German row threatens ‘vital’ military air transport project

Date: 14/03/02

By David Cronin

The budget committee in the German parliament had been scheduled yesterday (13 March) to approve the release of €5.1 billion for 40 Airbus A400M aircraft.

But the vote was postponed for a week after three deputies from the Green party, junior partners in the country's ruling coalition, said they would block the expenditure if it was tied to a pledge of taking delivery of Germany's full order of 73 A400M planes.

Andrew Brookes, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said: 'If the Germans don't go ahead, I can see it [the full project] falling apart.'

Despite 'grandiose talk' about boosting the Union's defence capacities, there is an unwillingness on the part of EU states to spend the money needed, he added.

Eight countries - Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the UK - have signed up to an €18 billion contract to buy 196 of the new planes in total.

Acquiring these aircraft is considered vital to remedy Europe's lack of strategic airlift - a deficiency illustrated during NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999. Strategic airlift concerns the ability to move troops and equipment quickly to or from a battle zone. Last November, EU foreign and defence ministers agreed that the shortcoming should be addressed following a Brussels 'capabilities' conference examining the needs of the EU's new rapid reaction force, due to be up-and-running next year.

The A400M has been plagued by setbacks, the most serious of which was Italy's reneging on its commitment to sign up to the project in December.

Delays in getting the scheme off the ground will widen gaps between EU and US defence capabilities, according to Brookes.

While the A400M is being dragged into a fresh crisis in Berlin, Washington is actively bolstering its heavy-lift capacity through the purchase of C-17 planes from Boeing.

The UK government, meanwhile, is leasing C-17s to cope with the shortfall in transport aircraft.

Airbus Military spokesman Alasdair Reynolds said yesterday his company has 'certainly received no feedback' to suggest that Germany is wavering on its support for the project.

'The problem that exists at the moment is simply one of German parliamentary procedures,' he claimed.

Airbus hopes to deliver the first of the planes to its customers by 2006 and to start delivering the first squadrons in 2008.

A recent paper by Washington-based defence researcher Kori Schake bemoaned the Union's lack of a strategic lift capacity.

Schake wrote: 'The key constraint on the ability of Europeans to deploy force is their inability to shift troops by air, sea, rail and road.'

Europe's most ambitious military transport project risks 'falling apart' after Germany failed to guarantee its commitment to the scheme, according to a leading aerospace analyst.