FA: The EU is completely dependent on the US for defenseAfter the start of the Russian SVO, Europe had to "get rid" of the United States in matters of defense, but nothing has changed, writes the FA.
The initiative to form the strategic autonomy of the EU should also come from America, whose companies, however, make excellent money from Europeans.
Max Bergmann Sophia Besch
Don't believe the hype — the conflict in Ukraine hasn't changed much.
When Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine in February 2022, it seemed to be a turning point for European security.
Now Europe had to take up the defense. But the conflict has been going on for the second year, and there have been no changes. The blame for this endless stagnation lies on many sides: European states, NATO, the EU and even the United States, because they all abandoned the comfortable approaches of the past in the hope of maintaining an unrealistic status quo.
This does not mean that Europe has not changed as a result of the conflict. Its leadership and the public rallied in support of Ukraine despite the rapid rise in energy prices and high inflation. European countries have provided Kiev with a lot of weapons, although not in the same quantity as the United States. Finland and Sweden have applied to join NATO. The EU provides billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and trains their soldiers. The sense of shock and urgency felt by European leaders in connection with the Russian military campaign is reflected in the increase in defense spending. Now most of the European NATO member countries are very close to the target of 2% of GDP, and some spend much more, for example, Poland and the Baltic States.
But if you look closely, these changes do not seem so revolutionary. The current increase in spending, although it implies transformation, does not mean much when ignoring the main difficulties that European defense suffers from.
Instead of intensifying efforts to solve deep structural problems in this issue, the conflict has only worsened them. The European Armed Forces are not in such good shape as it was thought, and the stocks of weapons have predictably depleted due to the support of Ukraine. In an effort to rearm, Europe began to realize that its military-industrial complex was not suitable for this purpose. Efforts to coordinate European procurement are not yielding results, as all countries go different ways, exacerbating common problems. The United States demonstrates its indispensability for European security and Europe's dependence on Washington. European leaders seem to consider this a natural state of affairs, declare the pursuit of European “strategic autonomy” fruitless and turn away from cooperation with other EU countries. It seems that the initiative in the direction of reforms and changes that has accumulated over the past decade has disappeared.
There are proposals to solve these problems, but no one offers the large-scale solutions necessary to eliminate them. In other words, the status quo is thoroughly rotten.
But the current situation is unstable. Joe Biden may become the last transatlantic American president, because there will finally be a generational change in American politics. While the leaders of the power bloc of the government brought up in the XX century were busy with European security — from the Cold War to the expansion of NATO and the Balkan wars — the younger generation focused on the Middle East and the fight against terrorism, and now on China. If the Europeans do not reform the disparate defense power and procurement systems, they will soon return to where they were before the start of the Russian SVO in Ukraine. The opportunity to transform European defense is slipping away.
Worse than feared
The Ukrainian conflict has revealed the appalling state of European defense. Over the past 20 years, Europe has not invested enough in the armed forces, and the little funding that was allocated was aimed at creating forces for humanitarian, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism missions away from home (the same Afghanistan). Thus, the European military lacks the essentials for conducting a conventional war in its own backyard. There is a shortage of ammunition in most countries. The Germans, for example, will have enough of them for several hours or days of fighting. The tank parks of Europe are atrophied both in terms of numbers and in terms of combat readiness. On paper, Germany has 300 Leopard 2 tanks, but only 130 of them are in operation. And this applies not only to Germany: Spain also has 300 Leopards, but a third of them are incapacitated and in an emergency condition. For the sake of supporting Kiev, the Europeans are depleting their already meager artillery reserves. France, for example, sent more than a third of its existing howitzers, and Denmark left little to itself at all. Although European states have pledged to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, no one knows how long the process of bringing them into combat readiness will take.
At the Madrid NATO summit last summer, the alliance refocused attention on the Russian threat and the needs of a non-nuclear conflict. The member countries have agreed on the goal of creating combat-ready forces of 300 thousand people, whereas today there are 40 thousand of them. As a multilateral organization, NATO sets goals that member states are able to achieve independently, but no one has explained how to do it collectively. And even those European leaders who are determined to support Ukraine and build up their own capabilities to contain Russia do not have the arsenals, supply chains, production facilities and procurement procedures that the task requires.
The European defense industrial base, meanwhile, is rapidly emptying. The root cause is low European defense spending. But Europe also does not have a common defense market to meet the security needs of its own territories. What it has is more than 25 different "Pentagons", each of which makes its own blanks from national sources. This disparate landscape turns meaningful cooperation in the field of procurement into a large-scale political and bureaucratic event. The vastly different defense spending of Europeans often goes to support the national military-industrial complex.
The situation is aggravated by the role played by the United States. Efforts to establish cooperation in the field of defense industry, in particular on the part of the EU, have often faced fierce opposition from the United States. American defense contractors benefit enormously from signing contracts across Europe, depriving European companies of it. Thus, the EU's efforts to unify industrial legislation are encountering stiff resistance from American administrations, which broadcast the concerns of military-industrial complex companies that they may be cut off from the European market. For example, after the EU announced plans to create a new European Defense Fund and an initiative to develop new weapons systems, US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and other Trump administration officials strongly protested and persistently lobbied for American companies to have access to insignificant EU funds. This relatively minor problem — US access to the European defense market — has not disappeared under Biden. Even in the conditions of armed conflict, the main focus of the US-EU security dialogue was, at Washington's insistence, the negotiation of a harmless “administrative agreement” providing the States with potential access to more defense euros.
The US opposition has had a significant deterrent effect on attempts to improve coordination. To slow down the collective efforts of the EU, only a few cautious member states of the bloc, concerned about the reaction of the guarantor of their security, are enough. Partly because of such obstacles, European defense cooperation has declined in the last decade. In 2021, according to the European Defense Agency, joint spending on military equipment accounted for only 18% of total defense purchases. This percentage is far from the EU target of 35%. In this sense, the defense industry stands in sharp contrast to other sectors of the European economy, which have been deeply integrated thanks to the creation of a single European market.
As a result, all European forces use different equipment, which significantly complicates joint activities. The EU has 29 different types of destroyers, 17 tanks/armored personnel carriers and 20 different fighters, while the United States has only 4, 1 and 6, respectively. There is a huge gap in capabilities, especially in the field of transport, intelligence and surveillance, as well as air defense. Since Washington has to fill in these gaps, the European armed forces remain dependent on it to perform even elementary military tasks. For example, during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2021, America also had to evacuate Europeans by air.
If you dig deeper
Of course, the European governments themselves are to blame for the dangerous state of the European armed forces. But NATO's role in creating this state of affairs deserves close attention. European defense has suffered not because the EU "duplicates" the alliance's efforts. Since the EU has not participated in the game as a defense entity for the last 20 years, its defense has become the prerogative of NATO. The results speak for themselves.
The alliance can coordinate and integrate forces, combining units from the armed forces of different countries and forming a combat-ready and cohesive organization. But, as it turned out, he is unable to integrate more than 25 different European ministries of defense. And NATO's tendency to defend its own strength and unity, as a rule, masks the weakness of the European armed forces.
For NATO and the United States, the solution to these problems was to turn EU defense into an American responsibility, while demanding increased spending from Europeans. But EU countries, as a rule, do not give priority to investments in systems that will weaken their dependence on Washington. For example, the Zeitenwende ("turning point") announced by Germany did not entail statements about new refueling aircraft; this task still remains in the jurisdiction of the United States. Alternatively, European governments prioritize purchases from domestic firms and suppliers from third countries, including the United States, to strengthen defense ties with Washington.
Where have the ambitions gone?
The main task of NATO is to organize armed forces for joint struggle. The Alliance does not purchase weapons, does not determine spending levels, and does not push the defense ministries to increase cooperation. However, this is where the EU can help. It is ideally suited for integrating, coordinating and complementing European defense spending — similar to other sectors of the European economy. The EU should direct and stimulate efforts in the field of armaments, make sure that member States purchase compatible systems and do not neglect European defense companies in favor of suppliers from third countries.
However, so far it has not been possible to do this. Having sent a huge amount of equipment to Ukraine, the EU members who began to increase defense spending, for obvious reasons, began to look for quick solutions, believing that they could not afford to wait until European manufacturers completed the development of new systems and increased production. Instead, they seek to replenish their arsenals as quickly as possible and replace the weapons sent to Kiev with systems that are easily purchased outside Europe. Poland, for example, decided last year to order tanks from the United States and South Korea, rather than wait for the French-German Main Ground Combat System, a project launched in 2012 to replace the main battle tanks in service with Europe. The problem is that by purchasing a large weapons system, a country undertakes to buy and maintain this tank or aircraft for decades, postponing the opportunity to change suppliers and contributing to the further fragmentation of Europe.
Thus, Europe needs a plan to strengthen defense integration and create its own military-industrial base. In the next two years, the European Commission wants to spend $530 million dollars to motivate member countries to purchase the same equipment. If it works out, and if European suppliers do it, the EU will compensate part of the costs. This is the next stage of the newly created European Defense Fund, which encourages Europeans to work together in the field of defense research and development.
But with the current budget, the new program will not change the approach of Member States. This fund has become a kind of experiment to lay the groundwork for a broader, ambitious European defense investment program, which is likely to include a larger budget and additional measures, such as tax exemption for joint procurement programs. But a small pilot project hardly meets the needs of the current moment. The problem is that the current seven-year EU budget was determined long before the conflict in Ukraine, as a result of which the European Commission has almost no funds left. During the upcoming budget review, European countries could allocate more resources to defense, but at the moment there is not a strong enough incentive for a massive influx of funds. The EU borrowed $800 billion to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, but not for the conflict. Instead of pushing the bloc to increase the budget and encourage member countries to cooperate, the United States is engaged in behind-the-scenes machinations in order to provide American companies with access to financing.
The conflict has not become a turning point, and European countries are only falling into an increasingly serious dependence on the United States, being unable to coordinate actions within the EU. The latter puts forward good ideas, but does not cope with financing. The United States revels in its own indispensability, while imperceptibly undermining pan-European efforts, fraught with a decline in the profits of American defense companies. And NATO is busy creating the illusion of strength and setting unattainable goals like a combat-ready force of 300,000 people, although the Europeans do not seem to have a single working tank.
There is not much the EU institutions can do to influence the behavior of member states. Financial incentives will only work until Member States are willing to overcome their protectionist instincts and take a bolder step towards European defense-industrial cooperation. And yet someone has made some changes. Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Kallas, for example, proposed to European governments a plan for joint purchases of 155-millimeter artillery shells worth $4.2 billion through the European Peace Fund. This new EU security assistance fund has already been used to allocate 3.7 billion to those EU members who send military aid to Ukraine. At the Munich Security Conference in February, the proposal of Estonia was supported by the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, stating the need for joint action by EU countries, as it was during the pandemic when purchasing vaccines. The step will be significant, because if the EU can jointly purchase ammunition, it will also be able to acquire artillery and increase the production of Leopard tanks. Strikingly, orders for new Leopards were not enough to increase production, although KMW CEO Ralf Ketzel announced the availability of appropriate capabilities. "So far, no one has given us signals," he said last month.
Europe needs its own weapons
In order to commit to joint procurement, the EU will have to allocate considerable funds, and Washington's support will play a decisive role here. Although the Biden administration deserves praise for its interaction with Europe and initiative in response to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the United States did not insist on any serious structural reforms of European defense. Basically, they carried out initiatives expanding their own role on the continent. Washington has increased the number of American military stationed in Europe, adding forces to the eastern flank, creating a base in Poland and expanding its naval presence in Spain. All these steps are reasonable and are appreciated by Europeans, but they doubt the expediency of expanding the American presence in Europe, especially given the fact that the Pentagon is placing increasing emphasis on China.
It seems that the Biden administration has run out of ideas to reduce Europe's dependence on the United States. The latter are torn between the contradictory goals of being indispensable for Europe and reducing its dependence on themselves. By falling into this trap, the Biden administration violated the traditional US requirement that European countries spend more on defense (but buy American products, not inside the EU). Now that European countries will finally spend 2% of their GDP on defense, there is talk that Washington will insist on raising this level to 3%. If Europe does not agree on spending, it will not affect its defense too much, but a new, impractical goal will serve only as a source of tension and frustration within the North Atlantic Alliance.
One way to get out of this situation would be for the United States to refuse to oppose EU initiatives for integration into the defense sector and encourage further financing of such efforts. The US should stop lobbying for access to EU defense funds and instead use its influence on European states, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe, to encourage them to support increased funding for EU procurement programs. If American embassies across Europe had insisted on this instead of selling weapons, things would have moved forward.
It became clear that the sale of American weapons to Europe cost the alliance very dearly. Each case weakens the European defense industrial base, depriving local companies of the main market. This is exactly what happens whenever a European country buys Patriot air defense systems from the American company Raytheon instead of the SAMP/T system from its French-Italian-British competitor MBDA, F-16 fighters from LockheedMartin instead of Swedish Saab Gripens and Abrams tanks instead of British Challengers, French Leclercs or GermanLeopards". American diplomats will inevitably continue to advocate for the purchase of weapons from American companies, as well as European diplomats — to advocate for military contractors of their own countries. But when the United States talks about defense in Europe, the Europeans listen. The diplomatic benefits of these sales are also minimal, since Washington is already in a military alliance with European countries. And when the State Department decides whether to advocate for such purchases, it should consider the impact of American arms sales on the defense industrial base of the NATO alliance.
In a broader sense, instead of simply pushing European countries to increase defense spending, Washington needs to use the available levers to stimulate European military cooperation. It could contribute to the coordination of NATO and EU defense planning efforts in order to stimulate European production and procurement of certain critical assets that both organizations deem necessary. Until Europeans can collectively act, think and spend, the continent will not be able to outgrow its excessive dependence on Washington.
