"Time for Europe to Step Up?" Topic

…von der Leyen said at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, that "Europe can – and clearly should – be able and willing to do more on its own," and she insisted that "It is time for Europe to step up to the next level."

Military: link

And they are acting quickly. They are quickly setting up the 231st Committee Group which will coordinate all relevant committees and subcommittees.

The 231st will report to a new EU General HQ Committee as well as the Subcommittee for Coordination of Committees.

Money has already been assigned for building on lavish new offices and diversity training is being organised.

And the offices will be spread around 6 eu states with staff moving between them 4 times a month!

Tally Ho!

The 49th tactical wing of stacking thing on top of each other is looking forward to a doubling of its budget and staff for future operation.

Ha!

Remember the St. Malo agreement in 1999? Here's the Wikipedia description:

link

Blair and Chirac agreed that Europe should have an autonomous, rapid-reaction force of 60,000. Back with my NATO job I saw how that reasonable aspiration slowly evolved into various national defence objectives that seemed to avoid the theatre and strategic enablers that would truly make such a force deployable and autonomous.

It's possible that it will be 'different this time', but that experience led to my rule-of-thumb which is that every bureaucratic initiative leads to the equal and opposite outcome of the original intention.

For example, an initiative to become more response will lead to being less responsive. I experienced this one too, shortly after the EU experience. I warned my superior about this at the start of a grand initiative by which he thought we'd become "more responsive". As it turned out – not so.

Yea, good luck with that.

Not going to happen. All of these countries are not willing to spend the money.

The real problem, whether in the US or across the pond, is that we don't understand who the real enemy is.

The enemy, sadly to say, isn't really the crazy-eyed jihadist with the bomb strapped to him. He can be handled. He is not the danger.

No.

The real danger is the mother standing at the border with her five kids. All six of them are underweight and dehydrated.

While she doesn't seem like an enemy, she's far more dangerous than her crazy-eyed husband or boyfriend.

Not now, but eighteen years from now.

Those six votes, as well as their built in beliefs about the USare what will turn the US into another Venezuela.

So what am I saying? Have them all shot? Throw them back across the border and let them die of thirst?

Again, no.

That is not America, and if it became America, she would be absolutely right about everything she believes.

So what is the answer?

I freely admit that I don't know.

I do know we need to come up with one, and darned quick. We need an America that is just as patriotic as it once was (not as it is now) and just as hard working as it once was (ditto) or what we have now will be gone in 18 years.

If it isn't already.

Huh????

Sadly I must agree with Gorgat. Europe is already suffering from its generosity and so are we. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Interestingly enough the Europeans are not happy with how they were not given a chance to engage under AUKUS, the new Australian-UK-US treaty.

The French aren't happy and not just because they lost out $90 USD billion but also because Marcon had met with Biden and this new treaty wasn't mentioned.

So for all of the "building alliances" stuff, Biden has managed to shunt his European/NATO partners out twice now – first with evacuation from Afghanistan and now this new AUKUS treaty.

Personally I think the French make a more logical partner for defence in Asia Pacific than UK as the French still have skin in the game in terms of overseas territories (French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia).

Personally the fact that Japan or Canada aren't in this treaty is also interesting. I had read Canada's more careful approach to China had excluded them from being considered.

If you weren't aware, refugees/migrant populations are an identified national security issue by NATO, EU and national MoD. So is nuclear proliferation – the thing is there aren't easy solutions.

As for Europe stepping up it has three structural issues – 2 are Cold War legacy ones and the third is political – compared to the US.

1) Conscription – the US moved to a volunteer force after Vietnam but Europe stuck with conscription until the Cold War ended – maybe some still have it. I haven't checked. A volunteer, professional force is more flexible and is more highly trained, but it costs more – salaries, pensions, e5c.

2) Most European forces in the Cold War were ‘main defence forces' meaning they relied on national infrastructure for logistics and were not deployable out of area. By default US forces under a policy of fighting enemies away from the US were deployable.

In time 1) and 2) can be overcome but it does require substantial upfront investment but now we have the 3rd problem.

3) Political fragmentation – with some minor exceptions there are no NATO or EU forces. There are national forces that come together in multi-national formations. Individual nations build and sustain the capabilities that would be contributed to a European, multi-national force. So when it comes to specialized capabilities – like port operations units – identifying which nations will build these is a major problem and what happens if a nation with a unique strategic logistical capability isn't part a particular mission? The US has the advantage of political integration and economies of scale which makes building and sustaining specialized capabilities easier.

So, even if citizens of European countries are willing to accept higher taxes for higher defence budgets it will still be difficult for Europe to be militarily independent of the US.

shadoe01,

Would it also be safe to say that save France, most of EU does not really want to participate in "out of region" defence activities?

It doesn't help most such US led activities have been failures – Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq.

Very often they act against European interests too – eg destroying Libya caused Europe massive issues with immigration and de-stablisation of sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact it would be safe to say the US out of region activities have caused more instability in the last 20 years than promote stability.

Also American objectives are often counter to European security – not just Libya but also Ukraine as well as American opposition to German-Russian energy ties.

Europe has a lot more to lose from a full scale Ukrainian War than USA does.

Note most European states only participate in out of region defence projects in a small and tokenistic manner.

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I think the Trump and Biden years will see a continued rift between USA and Europe.

I don't forsee any kind of massive European defence build up – it's simply not their way anymore. Europe will continue focus on diplomacy and other soft/subtle power methods whilst the Americans pursue their usual practice.

Would it also be safe to say that save France, most of EU does not really want to participate in "out of region" defence activities?

There's a huge difference between the near 'out-of-area' (e.g., the mission in Bosnia & Herzegovina) for which it is easier to convince Europeans that it's in their interests and the far 'out-of-area' which will often appear to many Europeans to be more for US interests. That should be surprising to no one. My time in NATO convinced me that Europeans had a pretty good idea of their national interests. Hence, as you say – contributions in a "small and tokenistic manner" when its primarily to keep the US happy and to demonstrate collective action.

At least when I worked in NATO counter-insurgency (COIN) was a national responsibility within NATO (e.g., Northern Ireland) or not a NATO mission. NATO missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were not COIN missions but stablization or training missions. I'm sure the (il)logic of a stablization mission concurrent with a COIN mission under different command structures in the same area of operations will not be lost on you.

However, it should be pointed out that the differences between deployable and main defence forces, between conscript and professional forces and between high readiness and low readiness forces are also significant factors that limit the size of contributions NATO countries can make (fyi – see * below). In my view there should be more discussion on things like readiness levels, conscription, etc. on TMP as these are big drivers of costs and utility of armed forces. The best source out there for this stuff was "How to Make War" by James Dunnigan (the wargames designer from way back in the 1970s). The last edition of his books was 2003 – here it is at Amazon:

link

So, to answer your question…by and large, yes. Part of my NATO job was to develop the 'logic' for peace support operations force requirements. When I left in 2003, a British colleague said that I had 'solved the problem'. I replied that I had not solved the problem, I had identified the problem. It would be up to the nations to solve the problem. It is an 'exercise left for the reader' to determine if they did.

I could go on and on but several of the issues are worthy of separate threads.

* A side bar – I think many in the US who are familiar with their volunteer, professional, deployable, (significantly) active military fail to appreciate the implications for Europe as it struggles from Cold War conscripted main defence forces to some more appropriate for today – yeah, it's 30 years but you might be surprised at how difficult it is to re-structure. Russia only managed to do so in the last decade and that was due to their experiences in Chechnya where they needed to take bits and pieces from practically every unit in their army to assemble the force for that mission. It was an eye-opener for them.

The EU should be very careful of what they do and say… not so much military… there isn't an EU military… but 'political' and 'Trade'.
Part of why Brexit was needed by UK.. too many 'Politicians', wanting to 'increase influence'… with nothing to back it up.
SO VERY DANGEROUS.
Britain now playing OUR own games… future… no idea… but not tied to EU clowns… WE can make our own! ALSO DANGEROUS… but… ours.
UK is still Geographically 'Europe' and WILL 'back up'…again… but we don't need EU Politicians for 'self -minded' stupid.

@ardo, I only noticed that you referred to most of EU. I took that to mean European countries within the EU or NATO (i.e., but not the UK). NATO has an out of area ambition with some capability to do so. The EU might have such an ambition but I think they could only do so by using NATO's command structure unless it was a fairly small force or close to Western Europe or it was a French led mission. Here the Wikipedia article with a list of EU missions – fairly small and akin to UN PK / monitoring missions.

link

As for NATO's European countries you might find this description of the defence planning process useful (paper from U of Warsaw forum):

PDF link

The key thing to note is that NATO requirements to defend /deter threats or potential threats is determined by the threat capabilities but out of area ops (called crisis management ops) are determined by an agreed ministerial guidance for a "level of ambition". This opinion piece in Defence News for a European level of ambition within the overarching NATO level suggests that there's still not fair burden sharing – ergo nations aren't really interested in out of area ops even if they agree to the stated guidance for level of ambition:

link

Does Europe have the $ & will to "step up" ?

US needs to step down and EU needs to step up. US has been in Europe for 80 years now, it is time to leave.

Do the Euros want the US to leave ? And why ?