Defence without direction by Sophia Besch
French President Emmanuel Macron recently made headlines with his comment that we are seeing the “brain death” of NATO – an alliance that is nominally functioning but lacks strategic aim and political focus. When asked for solutions, he pointed to the progress Europeans had made boosting defence initiatives outside of NATO. But EU defence also currently lacks direction. Europeans have come far in the last three years, particularly in terms of capability development. The European Commission proposes to allocate a total of €13 billion to defence research and development in the EU’s 2021-2027 budget cycle, compared to just €590 million in the previous one. To use this money effectively, the EU will need to fix its defence planning process. The European Court of Auditors recently pointed out that the EU has now created as many as four different planning tools – the capability development mechanism, the capability development plan, the co-ordinated annual review for defence and Permanent Structured Co-operation, or PESCO – that often overlap with or even contradict one another.
Image: © European Union, 2019
But in developing the EU’s defence policy, Europeans face challenges that will not be easily fixed by rearranging its capability planning instruments. Europeans risk losing sight of what they want to do with their military capabilities once they have developed them. EU foreign and defence ministers agreed in 2016 that the EU should invest in its ability to carry out
crisis prevention and management in its own neighbourhood, to help build up the capacities of its partners, and to protect the union and its citizens. To give substance to these intentions, the EU should do three things. First, Europeans need to flesh out the military implications of these strategic priorities. For example, what does ‘protecting citizens’ mean? Should it refer to the EU conducting counter-terrorism or cyber operations? Could it encompass the territorial defence of memberstates? The EU has a mandate for the latter: Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union says that EU countries are obliged to come to the aid of a fellow member-state subject to an armed attack on its territory. But governments have quite different views of how this commitment should be interpreted in the future. France, in particular, wants European militaries and defence ministries to war-game EU responses to a cyber or even conventional attack on a non-NATO EU member-state such as Finland or Sweden. Paris would like to see an EU political declaration during the French EU Council presidency in 2022 that would define what