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Paul Taylor, a contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the “Europe At Large” column.
SANTANDER, Spain — Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for common foreign, security and defense policy, likes to compare Europe’s armies to Japanese miniature plants.
“After the Cold War, we shrunk our forces to bonsai armies,” he said last week. “If each European state just increases its military capabilities according to their announcements since the start of the war in Ukraine, the result will be a big waste of resources. We’ll just have 27 bigger bonsais.”
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing European governments as they scramble to rebuild long neglected defenses in light of Russia’s imperialist aggression. The European Commission reckons that since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, EU members have announced plans for €200 billion in additional defense expenditure over the coming years.
But unless they coordinate their equipment purchases, harmonize military requirements and procurement timetables, and make their rival defense industries collaborate, EU countries run the risk of squandering taxpayers’ money on a grand scale, all without even making Russian President Vladimir Putin quake in his boots.
“We all realize that we need to spend more, but we need to spend better,” said Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner in charge of defense industries and space.
Alas, for now, the main European powers aren’t moving in that direction. On the contrary, each seems to be going its own way, with many choosing to buy arms off-the-shelf from dominant United States arms manufacturers, rather than building up a common European defense industry.
“The basic issue remains that European countries still lack a truly cooperative mindset when it comes to developing, acquiring and operating defense capabilities together,” wrote Ian Bond and Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform.
NATO and the European Defense Agency have repeatedly identified the key capability gaps that make European forces unable to sustain operations without U.S. help. These include a lack of strategic airlift, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft and satellites, drones, air defense missiles and stocks of precision-guided munitions.
European inventories have been depleted by the supply of equipment and ammunition sent to help Ukraine withstand the Russian onslaught. Much of the new money will be needed just to replenish those arsenals.
Trying to orchestrate Europe’s defense spending uplift, the Commission has proposed new incentives — including an initial €500-million fund over two years and a VAT exemption — to entice member countries to produce and buy weapons jointly, in groups of at least four, to avoid unnecessary duplication and make sure their new systems are interoperable.
Yet, more than almost any other domain, defense remains at the core of national sovereignty, and many EU governments are reluctant to see Brussels push a “buy European” agenda or muscle in on their arms procurement. They’re also wary of pooling their own limited intelligence — which is one reason why the Europeans didn’t see the Ukraine war coming, unlike the U. S. and the United Kingdom.
Even an EU-minded nation like Germany signed big checks quickly to order U.S. F35 fighters and P8 surveillance planes when it declared a Zeitenwende (historic turning point) after the invasion of Ukraine, and created a special €100-billion defense fund to re-equip its threadbare armed forces, so far allocating only crumbs for European collaboration.
Moreover, the most ambitious Franco-German-led armaments projects — the Future Combat Air System and the Main Combat Ground System — are in trouble, stalled by industrial and political feuding over leadership, technology and workshare. The quarrels between France’s Dassault and European aerospace company Airbus, and the squabbles between German tank-maker Rheinmetall and Franco-German KMW+Nexter Defense Systems, may well outlive the war in Ukraine.
Despite the U.K.’s withdrawal from the EU, it has managed to lure Italy and Sweden into collaborating on a rival future fighter project, code named Tempest. Given the huge cost of developing combat aircraft, and extensive U.S. inroads into the European market, the likelihood of both these sixth-generation European warplanes getting airborne is close to zero.
Logic says, there will either be one, or none. But the political hostility engendered by Brexit makes it hard to imagine the French and British governments swallowing their pride and agreeing to work together on a single European platform.
Defense cooperation among European countries already has a checkered history of cost overruns, cancelled orders and double crosses. Many plans died in the conception stage, and those joint systems that did get off the drawing board — such as the NH-90 helicopters and the A400M military transport plane — were often expensive, delivered late and inefficient due to divergent national specifications.
Supporters of European strategic autonomy are convinced that this time it’s different. Nathalie Loiseau, chair of the European Parliament’s defense and security subcommittee, cites three reasons that may change EU governments’ mindset: Putin’s agenda of aggression; a surge in public support and expectations for European defense; and the groundbreaking steps taken by the EU to jointly fund arms supplies to Ukraine, agree on a common threat analysis and adopt a Strategic Compass.
Loiseau acknowledges that while Europeans have talked the talk, they haven’t yet walked the walk: “The Commission can only provide incentives. It doesn’t have real power. Defense is in the hands of the member states. We have to convince the member states to plan in common.”
However, Jana Puglierin, a security expert heading the European Council of Foreign Relations office in Berlin, says there’s little enthusiasm for big collaborative projects, given the poor experiences of the past.
Ultimately, Europe must strike a balance between off-the-shelf purchases to plug immediate gaps and strengthening its defense industrial and technological base.
The EU has two unwitting allies in its efforts to get more collective bang for its defense euros: Putin and former U.S. President Donald Trump — or at least the specter of a future U.S. president who might fulfill his wish to pull out of NATO — and both are forcing EU leaders to finally get serious about defense.
But unless the bloc decides to make it a Chefsache, a top leadership priority as the Germans call it, European defense cooperation is doomed to fail once again. Only national leaders, acting together, can force their militaries, defense industries and treasuries to cooperate.
If not now, when?
