European Defense in Search of Strategy

On March 21, 2022, the European Union armed itself with the EU Strategic Compass: 20 months have passed, in which everything has happened in the rest of the world, but little has changed at the European level. On the 17^th of October 2023, Spain hosted its first military exercise involving 25 aircraft, six ships, 2.800 soldiers, satellites, and cyber assets in an assault against a seaport to rescue civilians trapped by a terrorist attack that destabilized a fictional country. Seven days later, the EU Council approved an updated maritime strategy (Revised EU Maritime Security Strategy), a document that is significantly more specific than the Compass, to which it properly refers. And this is all from Brussels, especially since no one practically talks any more about the Compass.

The official European narrative is clearly dressed to show a number of commendable things that happened during this period (financing, industrial plans, reorganizations, aid to Ukraine, missions, etc.), but which have insufficient connection with what is happening and what might happen. Peace dividends have virtually ceased since 2000 (data from SIPRI), the year when global military spending resumed. Since 1991, Europe has not only been surrounded by a ring of conflicts from the African Atlantic to the Caucasus, but has already experienced two major wars in its neighbourhood (the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine). America’s unipolar moment lasted from 1989 to 2004, when its Blitzkrieg in Iraq effectively failed in parallel with ill-conceived and conducted pacification efforts. The balance of the Cold War has been archived, along with many of the unspoken premises buttressing global security policy.

No one seriously believes that Russia, after invading Ukraine, is capable of attacking any NATO country within a decade. But it is clear that war has already knocked on the door of Europe and that a world war with its epicentre in the Pacific Ocean is not a far-fetched hypothesis.

The European elections in June 2024 should not, barring surprises, create strong pressure for change: defence is voters’ seventh priority with 25%, followed by the fight against organized crime and terrorism (20%), as the latest Eurobarometer showed. These are considerable percentages, but they are not enough when it is clear that poverty and exclusion dominate the debate.

Moreover, there are two important points that need to be clarified in the confusing and unrealistic debate about the strategic autonomy of European defence and security: strategic orientations and capabilities. The Strategic Framework is merely a politically agreed framework, but policymakers must take stock and now move beyond the current Strategic Compass, that is actually scheduled to be updated in 2025. Capabilities are the concrete expression of the political will of 27 countries. Strategic autonomy without capabilities is like reaching adult age without a salary, an empty word.

The Strategic Compass has great merit, as for the first time 27 countries have agreed on such a complex topic, but among its various limitations, two stand out: it did not account for the consequences of the war in Ukraine and the threats evaluation is based on consensus truisms.

The outcome of the ongoing war is simple: European countries, whether they are NATO allies or not, must begin reinforcing their conventional deterrence, that must be much more credible than in the past. On paper, EU countries spend 2,9 times more in the military sector than Russia, but in reality, they express much less fire power. If they had to face the roughly 300.000 Russian soldiers currently stationed in Ukraine in the first place, the major European countries today could deploy on the front line about 177.000 troops; i.e., they can only hold a defensive front. And this is in theory, because a hypothetical European army would resemble the Ukrainian army; probably equally heroic, but hampered by a devilish logistical support. The US Army is the axis of NATO’s credibility because it is also logistically homogeneous and has a coherent industrial apparatus behind it: the US Army has one type of tank in service, rather than five or more, as in European countries.

Therefore, if the ongoing war is mentioned superficially (and the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza is not taken into account until 2025), an important part of the overall threat assessment is missing. The rest of the Compass speaks about real problems, piled up and presented as new (many of them date pre-1989), while also lacking a clear vision of terrorism and non-state actors, on which the EU Justice and Home Affairs component has a fairly established assessment, but not integrated into this document. When there is no clear political direction, it is clear that we end up with bureaucratic stock phrases that cannot express strategic visions and interests.

The desired capabilities are derived, on the one hand, from a collective threat assessment, but even more from real events in the world. Judging by how they operate in practice, European governments apparently still believe they have time to evolve in small steps from a modest peacekeeping capability to a credible contribution to the deterrence and defence of the Old Continent. In 2001, the Helsinki Headline Goal wanted to create a rapid reaction force of 60.000 soldiers; by 2007 the subsequent EU battlegroups nominally amounted to 27.000 troops; today we are talking about a European Union rapid deployment capacity of 5.000 soldiers, including land, naval, and air components drawn from existing tactical groups. To date, not a single battle group has been deployed, not even symbolically.

From such concrete premises, few important choices can be taken. Firstly, to update immediately the Strategic Compass along with a realistic threat assessment. Secondly, to develop the European defence and security pillar by working constructively with NATO. Far from being a subordinate choice, it offers three things: preserving as long as possible a US guarantee to European security that has lasted for three-quarters of a century; giving an effective incubator for large joint weapons programmes (as has already happened with the European Tornado and Eurofighter combat aircraft); solving the strategic issue of the Indo-Pacific region in a politically useful way. Third choice, standardize European weapons while strengthening existing interoperability; standardizing is the basis of any serious autonomy. This does not mean excluding transatlantic procurement and cooperation; on the contrary, it means facilitating it between more homogeneous entities. Finally, create a true European military college, following the NATO model and in collaboration its structures, to provide the minds’ interoperability among very different military cultures. Then autonomy will become a real common result, and not a declaratory antagonistic goal.

This is all the more important if we do not play ostriches with the upcoming US elections in November 2024. We will be celebrating NATO’s 75^th anniversary in July, and it would be useful to conduct some informal Euro-Atlantic political modelling in case any next presidency makes unpleasant decisions. What if Washington decides to further bleed the Alliance, depriving it of serious political leadership? What if Trump instead took on the role of De Gaulle and withdrew from NATO’s integrated military structure, retaining only a political presence? An ounce of prevention, is better than a pound of cure.