The same European Union that regulates tomato cultivation down to the smallest detail and establishes very strict agricultural production quotas, hardly says anything about how weapons are to be manufactured, with what criteria and priorities.
The same European countries that cede food sovereignty maintain tight control over the composition of their armed forces. Protecting its borders remains much more important than common defense.
There is not even a consensus on what weapons are needed or how to develop them. There is a lack of gunpowder and cloud computing, and there is a lack of consensus on how to achieve one or the other.
The war in Ukraine, the Russian threat and increasingly pressing doubts about the United States’ commitment to European security have triggered defense investments. This year, all 31 NATO members will increase their spending and 18 will reach the goal of it representing 2% of their GDP. Spain will increase it by 0.06% to bring it to 1.3% of GDP.
This greater financial responsibility, in any case, continues to be carried out nationally. If defense spending is increased, the priority is to benefit national companies.
“The EU is far from designing or ordering weapons jointly,” said the strategic consulting firm McKinsey.
Currently, the Union armies have 27 missile systems, 20 types of fighters and 26 destroyers and frigates. “Integration will be slow,” said McKinsey.
Micael Johansson, general director of Saab and vice president of the European defense industry lobby, thinks the same, an association that brings together more than 3,000 companies. “The EU has not planned a common defense system.” This means that the sector does not act in a coordinated manner and that it is very difficult to repatriate and reinforce production chains.
Johansson, for example, explains that there is a lack of gunpowder, an essential component for any explosives manufacturer. Ukraine needs more than two million rounds of ammunition a year and industrial capacity in Europe is at capacity. Saab is expanding its factories in Sweden.
But the problem is not just getting more gunpowder and producing more weapons and ammunition, but doing it in a more coordinated manner. Today, each country has its own strategic culture, its own hiring and validation systems. They order weapons with very specific specifications. Although the fighters are the same, their encryption systems and other flight instruments, for example, are different.
What’s more, as the Ukrainians have seen, a 155-millimeter projectile from one manufacturer does not fit into the barrel of another supplier. The caliber is the same, but it doesn’t fit. There is a lack of what experts call interoperability, that is, weapons systems, even if they are from different manufacturers and for different clients, can work together.
The European Defense Agency estimates that only 18% of the investment is made jointly. It is half of the objective set by the agency itself.
“Cooperation between our armies is very low,” acknowledged Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy.
What was achieved during the pandemic for the purchase and distribution of vaccines was not achieved in defense.
“Europeans face the construction of their armed forces in a very fragmented and disorganized manner,” says the latest report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CEEI). It speaks of a “dysfunctional status quo” that is aggravated by the lack of coordination in investments, in deciding what weapons are needed and how to obtain them.
Pesco, the 2018 program for the joint purchase of weapons, is not enough according to the CEEI, nor is the European Defense Fund, endowed with 13 billion euros that should allow progress towards more integrated armed forces.
The mobility initiative, a program that facilitates the transfer of heavy weapons across EU borders – essential to ensure the long-term reinforcement of NATO’s eastern flank – has been left with almost no budget.
Arancha González Laya, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs, said a few days ago in La Vanguardia that Europe must Europeanize NATO and increase weapons manufacturing.
In addition to the explosives and ammunition that Ukraine so desperately needs, González Laya and other colleagues suggested a few weeks ago in Foreign Affairs that Europe must increase its strategic capacity and to do so it needs more planes, drones and satellites, and more cybersecurity tools.
As the failure of the mobility initiative demonstrates, the construction of a common defense is very complex.
The EU, for example, will not be master of its digital security as long as cloud computing services – which are essential for the armed forces – are not hosted in Europe. The vast majority of these servers are today in the United States.
Spain, Italy and France want all those who provide services to European companies, institutions and governments to be in Europe. To do this, however, it would be necessary to overcome the great distrust that exists in Eastern countries towards strategic autonomy.
“There is no trust between European allies,” says Lianna Flix, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC. “The bet,” she adds, “continues to be more on the United States than on a common defense.”
For the countries closest to the Russian border there is no better deterrent than the North American nuclear shield. Remember that it was the Pershing II cruise missiles that Ronald Reagan installed in Germany in 1983 that accelerated the collapse of the USSR. They all maintain that there can be no sustainable peace in Europe without credible deterrence.
This distrust is reflected in very relevant weapons programs, such as the Future Combat Air System, promoted by Germany, France and Spain. Germany itself has preferred to buy F-35 fighters from the United States rather than increase its investment in this project, which also competes with another parallel project from Italy, the United Kingdom and Japan.
Germany, in turn, launched a European anti-missile shield, to which 13 NATO countries – those closest to Russia – signed up, but which did not include France. The technology used in this shield is Israeli and American, while President Macron would have preferred it to be European.
Macron is the great defender of strategic autonomy, but he has not been able to convince the Eastern countries. If Germany is the financial pillar and economic engine of the EU, France must be the defensive pillar. Seen from Warsaw or Tallinn, this distribution of functions requires that France put its nuclear arsenal at the service of common defense. France does not object, as long as it maintains absolute control.
Rather than depending on France – in favor of negotiations with Russia – the Eastern countries and the Baltic republics prefer to continue depending on the United States.
There will be no strategic autonomy without its own industry, as Rem Korteweg, a Dutch expert at the Clingendael Institute, points out, but this requires a change of mentality. And it will not be easy because until now “European leaders have not thought about hard power as an instrument of foreign relations.”
The EU prefers soft power – humanitarian aid, for example – and when it has to intervene it opts for economic and financial sanctions, as has been the case with Russia.
Lianna Fix believes that “there is a very clear lack of leadership” not only to determine what weapons Europe needs but, much more importantly, to have a common foreign policy. Is a strong common defense possible without a coherent foreign policy? the analyst asks. The answer is no.
Without political unity there is no common defense and without common defense. There are no shared armies or consensus on what weapons Europe needs to be responsible for its own security.
