"World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it".
The Schuman Declaration, 9 May 1950
Europe’s
defence dilemma
Alphen,
Netherlands, 29 March. To paraphrase Churchill, a European army is a riddle
wrapped in a mystery in an enigma floating on a sea of verbiage. Can Europe finally
make the leap from seemingly bottomless strategic pretence to real-time
strategic defence?
Let me begin
by putting the current debate about a European army in its historical context. On
Friday last at an excellent conference on transatlantic relations co-organised
by the George C. Marshall Center and the Federal Academy for Security Policy I
gave a talk at Berlin’s Hotel Palace on Britain’s post-Brexit relations with
European defence. As I spoke I was metres from the famous and half-ruined
Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtsnichekirche. Seventy-five years before, on the night of
27-28 January 1944, 515 Royal Air Force Lancasters from Numbers 1, 5 and 6
(Royal Canadian Air Force) Groups, RAF Bomber Command, had attacked Berlin. The
main bomber force had been vectored onto its target by 15 RAF Mosquito
fighter-bombers of 8 Group who ‘painted’ Berlin city centre with marker flares
directly over the church. The attack was but one of many such bloody attacks
that saw the systematic destruction of Berlin by American, British and aircrew
from many allied nations during World War Two.
The ghosts of that night still haunt Berlin and act as both impetus and
brake on European defence. The Groundhog
Day talk of ‘strategic autonomy’ and a ‘European army’ is set against this backdrop
of historic destruction. Let me deconstruct both.
The dilemma
of European defence is essentially simple. If Europeans want the hard-pressed
Americans to maintain their defence guarantee to Europe then Europeans are
going to have to spend more on defence and build more and better armed forces. If
Europeans build more effective armed forces then the ‘strategic autonomy’ from the
Americans some crave will flow naturally. However, most Europeans are either
unwilling or unable to spend much more on defence. Germany, which is vital to any credible land
defence of Europe, is utterly reluctant to spend what it should on defence
partly because of history and partly because of its own domestic politics. The
result is a Europe that can neither defend itself adequately in the face of the
threats it faces, nor help ease the growing pressure on US forces that would
enable the Americans to defend Europe. Instead, many of those same Europeans who
promote ‘strategic autonomy’ want the Americans to underwrite said autonomy by
offering inadequate policies that bear no relation to the defence-effort needed, or promise force modernisation that could take decades to realise. In other
words, too many Europeans want strategic autonomy that is non-autonomous. Hence
the current, and latest, round of vacuous talk about a ‘European army’ in which
the neither means nor the ways bear much relation to the ends.
The German
question
Last week in
Aachen, the historic centre of the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne’s ninth century
court, a meeting took place between the French and German leaders at which the
German question was again addressed – how much military power should Germany
have and who should command it? Between 1952 and 1954 the first experiment in
creating a European army was conducted. Entitled the European Defence Community
it essentially involved the rearming of Germany but no German forces under
direct German command. Paris was insistent – Wehrmacht divisions? Never again!
The pressure for the EDC came from the Americans who were facing pressures from
the Red Army in Europe and the Korean War in East Asia, and at one and the same
time. Plus ça change?
A lot of the Aachen
meeting was devoted to high-sounding statements couched in Franco-German axis speak.
The consequent ‘Treaty’ stated that a Franco-German Defence and Security
Council would be established that would oversee military co-operation and
provide “…aid and assistance by all means at their disposal, including armed
forces, in cases of aggression against their territory”. At the same time, the
Council, according to Chancellor Merkel, would help foster a “common military
culture” that, “…contributes to the creation of a European army”.
Those two
statements alone encapsulate all that France and Germany disagree about over a
European army versus an army of Europeans. For the French, the EU’s Common
Security and Defence Policy is effectively dead. It died in the sands of the
Sahel and was killed off by a lack of European solidarity with France for a
mission that Paris believes of importance to the whole of Europe. Paris, instead,
is focusing much of its effort on the European Intervention Initiative (or E2I) outside of the EU institutional framework, partly to accommodate post-Brexit
Britain. The French idea of ‘strategic
autonomy’ can only be built by less EU defence and a new and better army of
Europeans led, of course, by Paris. For
the Germans, ‘strategic autonomy’ can only be built by more EU defence, even if
for Berlin NATO remains the main focus of any real defence of Europe.
Germany aspires,
or its leaders pretend they aspire, to some form of European army, i.e., a
supranational force a la EDC eventually, and utterly implausibly, run by
Brussels. General Selmayr? In other words, whilst the French and Germans can
agree for now on a future European force that is ‘joint’ the Germans insist it
must have the explicit ambition to one day become ‘common’. Experience suggests
that as soon as one attaches the word ‘common’ to any European defence policy
one can guarantee legions of more German lawyers, but few more European
warriors.
The EDC
failed for three reasons that continue to stymie ambitions for a European army.
Firstly, the French Parliament could not countenance the submersion of the
French armed forces, and with it France’s distinct strategic identity, within a
supranational structure. Secondly, then Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany,
the wily Konrad Adenauer, really wanted German membership of NATO and thus Germany’s
return to equal status with the Western allies. This he achieved in 1955. Thirdly, Sir Winston Churchill famously said
in 1953, when the French were pushing hard for Britain to join the EDC, “We are
with them, but not of them”. Nothing new there then.
The British question
The British
question for European defence is also as hard to answer now as it was then. The
hard truth for the French and Germans is that whilst the Americans are the
indispensable power for the credible defence of Europe, the British still
remain the ‘bloody useful and still quite important power’ for any meaningful
defence of Europe, particularly if US forces are busy elsewhere. This is even if, as I said in Berlin, Brexit
is fast eroding Britain’s commitment to the defence of Europe. Bust up and
break-up is what happens to defeated powers. Britain has too all intents and
purposes been defeated by the EU over Brexit.
London is already behaving like a defeated power with its political
elite fast descending into what will likely be a protracted squabble over who
lost Brexit and a prolonged struggle now to keep the UK together. Other
Europeans need the British to engage seriously in the defence of Europe thus they
are all going to have to pretend very hard that they have inflicted no such defeat
on Britain.
The other
factor, which pre-dates Brexit, is the defence-strategic choices Britain is
making. Those choices hardly suggest the British Army of the Rhine reborn. New
fleet aircraft carriers, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, new nuclear
attack submarines, new frigates and a host of F-35 strike aircraft do not a
Continental Strategy make. The British Army is the smallest it has been since
Napoleonic times and could fit inside Wembley Stadium. And, whilst the Royal
Navy and RAF have hit their respective recruitment targets, the Army is unable to
‘man’ even the tiny 82,000 strong force set by the last defence review in 2015.
The British Army maybe a ‘high-end’ force, but it is a very small high-end
force. In other words, even though
Britain’s future force will pack a considerable punch much of the main land
force for the credible defence of Continental Europe must come from an army of other
Europeans, necessarily and essentially focused on Germany.
No European
audit, no European army
Back to the
European defence dilemma. All that really matters is that Europeans
collectively generate the required defence outcomes they need. However, it is
the Americans, and Europe’s potential adversaries such as China, Russia et al that
will set the scale of those outcomes. Realising such a force goal will thus
require the application of an appropriate level of resource in an effective and
efficient way with sufficient redundancy therein for Europeans to act as
effective first responders in and around Europe, across the conflict spectrum
and in parallel if needs be. Such a force once generated could either be
committed to NATO, Europe’s primary line of high-end defence for many years to
come, or the EU, Europe’s primary vehicle for dealing with complex strategic
coercion short of war also for many years to come.
The enduring
weakness of European defence is that too many Europeans still think words can
substitute for force. That was the essence of Aachen, a large mouse pretending
to roar like a lion. If France and Germany are serious about leading Europe towards
strategic autonomy they will need a plan.
That plan would necessarily first involve a thoroughgoing audit of all
European defence forces and resources for only then could synergies be
identified that would end the culture of irrational national duplication of
effort. Europeans could only then begin to better spend existing resources and
move towards the modular, standardised army of Europeans that would balance the
demand for national sovereignty over sanctioned violence and the aggregation of
force for strategic effect. Aachen would have been much more impressive if France
and Germany had started Europeans off down that road by building on Berlin’s
commitment to act as a framework power. Only via such strategic realism and
pragmatism will a European future force be realised that combines both
the necessary of speed of decision and action necessary for fighting future war
with the mass of force and resource needed to cope with contingencies across
the people protection/power projection continuum.
What army?
The strategic
ambition therein implies another question. What future force in which to
invest? Creating a European military culture is one thing, but if it is simply
a culture of legacy left-behinds that makes no attempt to balance strategy,
capability and technology then be it a European army or an army of Europeans it
will be an army of the strategically-irrelevant. Therefore, to solve the dilemma that is
European defence, and thus prove that Aachen was more than strategic theatre, Berlin and Paris would need to answer two other pivotal questions. What kind of
future forces do they think Europeans will need? What is the relationship of PESCO
and its European Defence Fund to the generation of such a future force?
If
ever-decreasing PESCOs simply lead to an analogue ‘European Army’ that bolts
together a lot of European legacy stuff then it is yet more European strategic
pretence. If, on the other hand, PESCO is suffused with sufficient ambition to
help forge what no single European state can aspire to then it has purpose.
Europeans will need an information-led digital 5D future warfare defence that
counters disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, deception and destruction.
Such a a twenty-first century European defence would necessarily be built on a European
future force that masters the cross-domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space,
information and knowledge, and which is powered by the revolution in military
technology and the application in the battlespace of Artificial Intelligence,
big data, machine-learning, quantum-computing et al. Only with such a force will European defence,
and thus European deterrence, be credible and European strategic autonomy
steadily emerge.
NATO? What
France and Germany envisioned at Aachen could, at best, be the beginning of a
re-pillared hybrid NATO that is part alliance, part coalition. The Alliance would thus
provide the framework for a Yankosphere that would include the US, Britain and
Canada, and which could also reach out to Japan and the other Five Eyes powers,
and a Eurosphere led by France and Germany. At worst, the Eurosphere will
simply become yet another gilded European repository for the strategically lame,
the left behind, the incompetent, the strategically-retired, or the plain simply
can’t be bothered. Where Aachen would
leave countries like the Netherlands is anyone’s guess. Its very small but
good army is close to the Germans, its very small but good navy is close to
the British and its very small but good air force is close to the
Americans.
A European
army or an army of Europeans?
All that
really matters is that Europeans collectively generate the required defence
outcomes that are “…proportionate to the dangers which threaten it”, as Robert
Schuman suggested, and consistent with the effective maintenance of a credible
transatlantic security relationship and the equitable sharing of burdens that a
deep and enduring relationship will demand and entail. The mistake many in Europe now make is to
believe strategic autonomy is the heir apparent to the 1950 Schuman
Declaration. It is not. But, it IS time Europe grew up strategically and here I
am in full agreement with Paris. ‘Creative efforts’ today mean a transatlantic
security and defence relationship underpinned by a level of European military capability
and capacity that is fair to the Americans and proportionate to the defence of
Europe. Whether a defence hike is achieved via a European army, or the more likely
army of Europeans, Europeans are going to have to spend more on defence and
generate far more advanced forces. To that end, the French and Germans must recognise
there is a marked difference between defending Europe and using defence as a
lever for political leadership of Europe which they did in Aachen. Politics
dressed up as defence has been the curse of European defence.
Twenty years
ago I published the first of the Venusberg Group reports on the future of
European defence for the Bertelsmann Stiftung. Reading that report again I am
struck by how little of substance has changed and how Aachen seems so very
1990s. What an appalling indictment of Europe’s leaders. The bombing of Berlin
less than a lifetime ago should also set European defence and Brexit in their
respective strategic contexts. First, big wars happen. Second, once enemies are
now friends and it must stay that way. As for a REAL European Army it could
only exist if there was a REAL European Government. I am not holding my breath.
Julian
Lindley-French
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