European Student Think Tank

Recog­niz­ing that Europe’s defense min­is­tries must cut spend­ing to stay within budget con­straints, the Atlantic Com­munity hos­ted a theme week to explore ways in which Europe can improve secur­ity while spend­ing less. Con­trib­ut­ors agreed that in order to improve its mil­it­ary cap­ab­il­ity and effi­ciency, Europe must resolve its internal divi­sions and recog­nize that long-term solu­tions will likely involve short-term costs. The recom­mend­a­tions made in the ‘Secur­ity Des­pite Aus­ter­ity’ theme week are sum­mar­ized in the Atlantic Memo below.

1. Con­sol­id­ate pri­or­it­ies and enhance polit­ical cooper­a­tion on defense.

Many defense min­is­tries are mak­ing short-term spend­ing cuts on a national basis without coordin­at­ing with their European part­ners. Aus­ter­ity will impact the European defense sec­tor for years to come, and indi­vidual, suc­cess­ive cuts such as those recently made in the UK and Ger­many do not pro­mote long-term effi­ciency in defense. To more effect­ively cut spend­ing and improve cap­ab­il­ity, states must coordin­ate reforms (Mölling).

Atlantic Com­munity mem­bers agree that defense cooper­a­tion between states requires com­plex con­di­tions for suc­cess, includ­ing sim­ilar stra­tegic cul­tures and polit­ical cooper­a­tion, and that NATO and the EU offer appro­pri­ate struc­tures for this kind of reform.

Coordin­ated reform is not pos­sible, how­ever, if states do not recon­cile dif­fer­ing views on their col­lect­ive future and agree on Europe’s most press­ing threats. Some view Rus­sia as a part­ner while oth­ers view it as a threat; like­wise, there is no con­sensus on whether Europe will con­tinue to integ­rate and be uni­fied or if internal divi­sions will ulti­mately drive European states apart (Dorman). Polit­ical rela­tions are also strained by dis­par­it­ies in burden-sharing in Afgh­anistan. These asym­met­ries have divis­ive effects on European solid­ar­ity, and must be reduced to achieve coordin­ated, long-term reform (Schnaubelt).

2. Stream­line for short-term sav­ings, integ­rate for long-term efficiency.

Large scale reform is unlikely to res­ult in short-term sav­ings, but it is the best way to improve long-term secur­ity by pro­mot­ing effi­ciency and redu­cing over-reliance on the US.

The best way Europe can save money now is for NATO to avoid tak­ing on new, ambi­tious exped­i­tion­ary mis­sions. Short-term sav­ings could also come from com­mon sense struc­tural changes to stream­line national defense min­is­tries, which could reduce over­head by cut­ting unne­ces­sary pro­jects and per­son­nel (Schnaubelt).

To make defense more effi­cient in the long term, states should imple­ment pool­ing and shar­ing at the earli­est stages of pro­ject research and devel­op­ment. The first step should be to link national cap­ab­il­it­ies to the industrial/technological base to enhance cross-border cooper­a­tion in equip­ment devel­op­ment and pro­cure­ment; for whatever is developed and built jointly can eas­ily be bought, oper­ated and fought with jointly (Mölling).

Europe could also imple­ment a two-tiered sys­tem with national mil­it­ar­ies to retain basic land, air and sea cap­ab­il­it­ies for home­land defense and a pan-European force to handle spe­cial­ized and exped­i­tion­ary mis­sions (Gvos­dev). Altern­at­ively, states could work in part­ner­ship – bilat­er­ally, tri­lat­er­ally or mul­ti­lat­er­ally – and spe­cial­ize in the cap­ab­il­it­ies they pro­duce best (Dorman). States should also make long-term invest­ments in mil­it­ary train­ing, edu­ca­tion and new equip­ment field­ing to meet future chal­lenges (Schnaubelt).

3. Open defense mar­kets across national boundaries.

Open­ing the defense mar­ket across all EU states would reduce equip­ment duplic­a­tion and lower prices through increased com­pet­i­tion and greater eco­nom­ies of scale (Hel­big). The civil­ian sphere of indus­trial, tech­no­lo­gical, reg­u­lat­ory and struc­tural policies must be coordin­ated under the aus­pices of the EU to achieve last­ing defense sec­tor reform. Rather than let­ting the bulk of equip­ment pur­chases be made within national bound­ar­ies, as they cur­rently are, the EU should break state pro­tec­tion­ism, cut red tape and increase cross-border com­pet­i­tion between arms man­u­fac­tur­ers, allow­ing mar­ket forces to pre­vail over con­cerns of national prestige (Titoff).

Related posts:

1. Atlantic Community’s MEMO 33: NATO Part­ner­ships – Strength­en­ing Ties with Asia
   Novem­ber 13th, 2011
2. EST announces cooper­a­tion with “Atlantic Com­munity”
   Novem­ber 13th, 2011
3. Con­sequences of Libyan crisis on the EU’s secur­ity of sup­ply
   March 1st, 2011
4. Why aus­ter­ity is not going to save Greece
   Feb­ru­ary 26th, 2012
5. Let the Future of Europe begin…
   Octo­ber 14th, 2012