Policy coordination in the CFSP and ESDP has developed since 1999 and today the EU is a net exporter of security. The Union is well placed to link a wide palette of economic, diplomatic and military means in the fight against multifaceted threats and challenges. It is a unique forum for coordination and consultation across nations, borders, sectors and institutions. The EU has the potential to become a global force in conflict prevention and crisis management. While the EU may not manage potential or active crises in the same way, or using the same instruments, as the US or a US-led coalition, it may potentially become a valued strategic partner where common values and interests are at stake. However, without the development of more relevant capabilities, and increased European coordination Europe will be limited to yesterday's tools for tomorrow's challenges.
Currently, the military capabilities of EU member states fall short of their declared ambitions, and will do so for years to come. Relying on current institutions, processes, defence-budget levels and defence planning, Europe will, at best, see only marginal increases in its military capabilities over the next five years. The picture is brighter regarding non-military/civilian crisis-management capabilities. However, significant political obstacles complicate efforts to enhance the EU's overall capabilities, both in the civilian and military fields.
The US and NATO have offered their support and cooperation. It is now up to the UK, France, Germany and the other EU member states to improve and better coordinate their efforts to produce enhanced capabilities and, ultimately, achieve an increase in the substantive level of European contributions to regional and worldwide security fully commensurate with the role, interests and resources of the EU and its members. It would help if the debate on increasing European crisis-management capabilities focused less on institutional labelling, fanciful notions of European global power projection, a ‘European Army’ or supposed challenges to the US and NATO, and instead identified how European states can realistically increase their capacity for effective conflict prevention and crisis management. Most of all, Europe needs better mechanisms and processes for coordinating national capabilities.
Despite slow progress in implementing the NATO Defence Capabilities Initiative and the EU Helsinki Headline Goal, the Europeans will in 2003 possess a large, albeit traditionally-structured, force reservoir. The EU member states will essentially be capable of performing all the military tasks that fall explicitly within the Petersberg spectrum, including peace enforcement. For complex operations demanding a high operational tempo, reduced risks to EU forces and minimum collateral damage, Europe will, for the rest of the decade, still depend on US assets. Strategic sea and airlift, intelligence assets and all-weather precision-strike capabilities are further prerequisites for major high-tempo operations.
Over the next few years, quantitative and qualitative improvements in reconnaissance, communications, strategic lift, air-to-air refuelling, tactical mobility, force protection, combat search and rescue, electronic counter-measures, theatre-missile defence, UAVs, precision-guided munitions, NBC protection and logistics will indicate how far the NATO and EU capabilities initiatives have succeeded, and to what extent the prospects of EU operational autonomy for larger combat operations are going to be realised. In any case, several years will normally elapse between the appropriation of funds and the availability of new operational capabilities. So far, the impact of the DCI and the Headline Goal on European force modernisation has been limited. It remains to be seen if the November 2002 NATO Prague Capabilities Commitment will generate more than a marginal additional increase.
Real increases in European military capabilities will derive not only from the acquisition of new assets, but also from innovative organisational approaches. There is great potential in the pooling of assets and capabilities, rationalisation and multinational cooperation in military education and training, doctrinal development, logistical support and defence-industrial consolidation. Joint procurement and production and far-reaching pooling initiatives – from air transport, electronic warfare, maintenance and logistics to defence-research establishments – will save money and produce more interoperable and flexible capabilities. It takes several years for multinational formations to become truly effective and operational. Action must be taken soon, or the opportunity to increase European capabilities in this decade will be lost. The price for such action will be paid mainly in national prestige, as the desire for national ownership of defence assets and industries dies hard. Unilateral engagement against the will of partners and allies will also become more difficult once multinational development, procurement and pooling are the norm.
‘Jointness’ and interoperability within NATO remain key challenges. The transatlantic technological and doctrinal gap will not close given the rapid pace at which the US is acquiring new high-tech assets. The European focus on crisis management and peace support is in stark contrast to the US attention to high-tech warfare and homeland defence. Of course, the responsibility for keeping forces interoperable and enabling them to reap the benefits of ‘jointness’ rests on both sides. This is likely to be an issue of transatlantic debate and finger-pointing. The standards of US-led war-fighting coalitions and NATO peace enforcement will not necessarily be the same as those for EU-led operations. The new NATO Response Force may bridge part of the gap. European interest and European access to US transformational technology and doctrine will determine the level of success.
The EU's dependence on NATO (as opposed to US) assets and capabilities is actually marginal. Although NATO's UK-led rapid-reaction corps is the most effective corps headquarters in Europe, the only collective NATO capability upon which the EU depends is the operational planning capacity in SHAPE's Combined Joint Planning Staff. National planning and command-and-control capabilities exist in the UK, France and Germany. This means that the EU is in fact not vitally dependent on NATO's collective assets. Even ‘SHAPE-like’ multinational planning capabilities could if necessary be duplicated within the EU.
Nevertheless, NATO's established military-integration structures provide an indispensable framework for the transition to enhanced European forces capable of full-spectrum operations. NATO is likely to remain relevant to the EU even after its dependence on US forces becomes less pronounced than today. In the interest of reaching the EU's declared capability goals, practical contacts between the EU and NATO must be developed at all levels, particularly between military staff and decision-makers. There is value in working towards synchronised defence planning in parallel in NATO and the EU. The EU would greatly benefit from live exercises to develop its operational and tactical capabilities.
European capability-building efforts must be evaluated on their own merits, and in their own timeframe. The EU's comparative advantage lies not in high-intensity warfare, but in conflict prevention through the coordinated use of diplomatic and economic measures, and crisis management with civilian and military means. It would be a mistake to judge the EU's military capabilities in isolation from its other crisis-prevention and conflict-management capabilities. For many scenarios, improvements in decisionmaking and the determined application of the economic, diplomatic and civilian elements of crisis management could prove just as important, if not more so, than war-fighting capabilities. Increasingly, the capabilities needed for such operations are just as relevant for many internal challenges, such as civil emergency support, man-made and natural disasters and the fight against terrorism.
The development of crisis management in the spheres of civil protection and conflict prevention is particularly important. Significant progress has already been made in the EU, but there is vast potential for additional measures to strengthen the EU's ability to deal with disasters, build coordinated European police and gendarmerie capabilities, promote the rule of law in areas of instability, conduct observer missions and defence diplomacy and share intelligence on threats and risks from terrorism, critical-infra-structure attacks and weapons of mass destruction. In combining such capabilities with its diplomatic, economic, financial and military potential, Europe has much to offer. Close coordination between the civilian and military elements of crisis management, including establishing pre-trained, interoperable and high-readiness Reaction Packages, would further enhance Europe's ability to employ its widely-defined power to the benefit of international peace and security.
The core challenge is to develop the EU's political cohesion and strategic decision-making capability, linking the various elements together in common long-term policies. Only when trade, diplomatic initiatives, loan policies, national NGO initiatives and regional relations are combined can conflict prevention succeed. It would also make sense to coordinate issues such as defence-industrial cooperation, technology transfer and intelligence at the strategic EU level. Today's EU lacks a command and control establishment even for civilian operations. To turn the EU as a whole into a strategic actor, unity of command would first have to be assured across the crisis-management spectrum, from the political level down to field operations. In the complex relationship between member states and community institutions across the EU's three pillars, the question of who is in command must be resolved.
Eventually, one body needs to be coordinating all civilian and military elements of the ESDP and the EU's external relations. Such an ‘EU Security Council’ would go a long way to overcoming the well-known shortcomings that have prevented the EU from being seen as a strategic actor: insufficient coordination between the three pillars, inadequate civil-military integration, ill-defined interests and policies, insufficient efforts to build public support and a failure to actively seek wide coordination and dialogue with other governments and international organisations – above all the US – in early, proactive engagement, initiative, risk-taking and leadership.
Autonomous strategic decision-making and military self-sus-tainability in intelligence – both declared goals of the EU – also call for proper EU intelligence capabilities, including CFSP ESDP-specific assessments and analysis. Effective conflict prevention in the pre-crisis phase demands high-quality and multifaceted intelligence. Further operational intelligence is necessary for any crisis-management engagement. There is a growing need for a centrally-coordinated EU intelligence function modelled on the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, and a fundamental reassessment of intelligence cooperation requirements in Europe.
Capabilities development is not about autonomy, national posturing or grand visions of power projection. Mere quantities of assets and institutional labels are of little use. What it is really about is rational coordination within Europe, pragmatic cooperation between the EU and NATO and between the EU and the US, and the development of a combined ability to project security internally and externally. The outcome will depend, more than anything else, on the quality of political relations between the EU and the US. European capabilities, both civilian and military, are likely to advance faster and with more success if transatlantic relations focus on generating improved abilities to act jointly in preventing crises, countering threats, managing conflicts, supporting stability and enhancing international peace and security.