Kosovo tests EU’s military ambitions

Date: 27/04/2000

NATO's decision to hand over operational command of the peace-keeping forces in Kosovo to the five-nation Eurocorps last week suggests that the Union is closer to achieving its goal of creating an independent crisis-management force than some might think. Simon Taylor reports

CYNICS who pour scorn on the Union's ability to conduct military operations without NATO holding its hand should take a look at last week's events in Kosovo.

For the first time in the transatlantic alliance's 50-year history, a wholly EU body - the five-nation Eurocorps - took command of a military operation. The image of Eurocorps commander Spanish general Juan Ortuna receiving the flag of the Kosovo peace-keeping force (KFOR) signalled that the Union's military ambitions are not as far out of reach as some critics suggest.

Admittedly, although Eurocorps is now responsible for overseeing operations on the ground in Kosovo, NATO remains in ultimate charge. But this vote of confidence in an organisation composed entirely of EU member states demonstrates how far an autonomous European military capability has evolved and offers a promising foretaste of what it could achieve in the future.

Eurocorps started life in the 1980s as a solely Franco-German initiative designed to show that the two great European rivals had put the great wars of the 20th century behind them. Since then, it has expanded to take in three more EU countries - Spain, Luxembourg and Belgium. More importantly, it has shaken off its reputation for being the military equivalent of vanity publishing. The NATO powers would not have allowed Eurocorps to run KFOR if they did not believe it could do the job, even though 80% of its 36,000 troops are from Union member states.

Eurocorps' performance in Kosovo will be a crucial test of whether the EU can be trusted to manage military operations in future. To do this, say military experts, the Union will need to create its own military command for its planned 60,000-strong rapid-reaction force - and an expanded Eurocorps could be a perfect candidate for the task.

The rapid-reaction force is one of the headline goals the EU has set itself to achieve by 2003. Serious thinking about how to create that force, which will in fact require member states to commit themselves to providing nearly 200,000 troops because of the need to rotate soldiers on the ground, will start after the Union summit in Oporto in June. The aim is to reach agreement on each country's contribution to the EU's overall effort at a capabilities pledging conference in December.

In the run-up to Oporto, the temporary committees set up to design and plan the Union's fledgling security and defence policy have been focusing on institutional issues. Since 1 May, a team of high-ranking foreign ministry officials on the new Political and Security Committee (or COPSI, as its known under its French acronym) have been advising the EU on how to use military means to pursue its foreign policy aims. Alongside this is an interim military committee, made up of senior uniformed officers including several four-star generals, advising on technical and tactical issues.

Discussions in COPSI have so far focused on the key questions of how the EU will interact with outside bodies, especially NATO as an organisation, and the six European countries which belong to the transatlantic alliance but are not members of the Union. Of these, four - Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - are candidates for EU entry.

Although all Union governments, even those who with neutral status such as Ireland and Sweden, accept that the Union will have to rely on NATO's operational expertise in times of crisis, progress in talks on future links with the alliance had been limited until last week.

But officials say hopes of reaching some kind of agreement at the June summit have now been boosted by signs that France is prepared to show more flexibility on extending links with the alliance beyond the current weekly breakfast meetings between EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and NATO Secretary-General George Robertson.

The committees have also been studying options for involving non-EU NATO members which want to contribute troops and equipment to crisis-management missions in decision-making. As Solana explained to the Norwegians on a recent visit to Oslo: 'The European Union hopes to find mechanisms where countries like Norway, which are part of NATO but not a part of the Union, can feel comfortable.'

One proposal being considered is to model the new arrangements on the rules governing the Schengen free-movement agreement, under which third countries can sit in on meetings where their interests are being discussed.

The task of reassuring non-EU countries that they will be fully involved in what are, on paper at least, exclusively Union structures will no doubt be solved through imaginative diplomacy. But the bigger challenge remains whether EU countries can spend the money needed to close the technological gap on the US at a time when governments are looking to maximise the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War.

The most glaring example of the pressure on budgets is Germany, where Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping needs to cut defence spending by €1 billion over the next three years to help balance the books and is looking at various options, including reducing troop numbers by nearly a quarter from 330,000 to just 260,000.

But the Union is acutely aware that Europe's reliance on American tactical equipment during the Kosovo campaign meant that the US launched 80% of the precision-guided munitions, flew most of the sorties and provided 95% of the cruise missiles. 'The existence of such a gap in the fundamental capabilities of modern combat is disturbing,' says Kent Kresa, chief executive of US defence giant Northrop Grumman.

To close that gap, the most enthusiastic advocates of a strong independent security and defence policy - France and Italy - have called for EU countries to set targets for the percentage of gross domestic product to be spent on defence in a bid to raise the Union average from around 1.7% to closer to the US' 3.2%.

But military officials argue that the key to meeting the EU's ambitious goals is not so much increased spending as more effective spending. 'There was a general need for modernisation of armies after the end of the Cold War,' says one French official. 'The problem is how to achieve better coordination of military spending and to profit from rationalisation at European level.'

Modern armed forces need to be easily deployable, whereas most European countries still have static armies with large numbers of tanks which were designed to repel land-based attacks from behind the former Iron Curtain.

Meanwhile, beyond the sometimes abstract world of committees and structures, the European defence industry has been going through the biggest series of mergers in its history. The last year has seen France's biggest arms firm Aérospatiale Matra privatised and merged with Spanish defence contractor CASA, Germany's DASA and Italy's Finmeccania to form the new giant EADS.

Alex Ashbourne, defence industry analyst at the Centre for European Reform in London, sees this merger mania as the direct result of governments rethinking defence expenditure in the wake of the end of the Cold War.

Once the industry has digested the impact of these mega-deals, Ashbourne believes the creation of the Union's new security and defence policy will act as a spur to closer coordination of EU countries' military spending. This could eventually lead to the creation of a single European buying agency, because it will simply be too expensive for one European country to buy a fighter aircraft and bear all the costs of servicing and support if its military partners have chosen another plane. 'CESDP will feed into moves to set up a unified procurement agency because you cannot have unified forces without unified requirements,' argues Ashbourne.

Stalin once famously dismissed the political power of the Catholic church by asking how many divisions the pope had. The Union will have to be in a position to realise its own military ambitions by the end of this year if it is not to be dismissed so lightly.

Major feature. NATO's decision to hand over operational command of the peace-keeping forces in Kosovo to the five-nation Eurocorps suggests that the Union is closer to achieving its goal of creating an independent crisis-management force than some might think.