 |
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here today and to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on the subject of European Defence in such distinguished company. I know it is fruitless to run a competition as to which part of defence policy is most important, but European Defence has certainly pushed its way up the agenda again over the past year or so.
Indeed, we in the UK have been doing much of the pushing.
We had much to do with launching or re-launching the debate last autumn. With France, in the St Malo Declaration, we both made clear that we want to strengthen Europe’s contribution to its own security. The crisis in Kosovo has subsequently demonstrated very clearly that we need to strengthen this contribution.
We also made clear at St Malo that we wanted to move ahead in the forum of the European Union, and with the new arrangements on foreign and security policy to make a reality of the Treaty of Amsterdam. But we wanted to do this in a way that took full account of NATO, of the Western European Union and all European nations.
A joined-up approach, you might say.
No-one has said this will be easy. And one can discuss for a very long time the implications and the complications of the national and international relationships I have just mentioned. These are fascinating and important subjects which I expect I shall be returning to very frequently in the next few years and indeed this afternoon.
First, however, we need to ground the discussion in the real world of capabilities. Some think that institution building is a substitute for capability building. But you cannot send an institutional wiring diagram to a crisis. Nor should new institutional restructuring be a way for some countries to get more influence without delivering more of the necessary means of taking action.
Crises , and the consequences of crises, affect us all and their prevention and resolution must be a common mission.
Political will to respond to a crisis can be created relatively quickly, if the circumstances are right. But political will needs access to real and useable capabilities and these cannot be created quickly.
Let us revert to Kosovo for a moment. You will forgive me, I hope, if I repeat a few points you may have heard before.
European aircraft operated over Kosovo throughout the air campaign. But we relied heavily on our American Allies for the necessary night and day precision bombing capability. We Europeans flew only a third of the total number of aircraft sorties during the campaign, and only 20% of the strike sorties. It was American military power that gave credibility to the diplomatic campaign. True, the majority of forces now operating under NATO command as KFOR are from European nations. But deploying a force of a few tens of thousands, less that 2% of the total military personnel available to us, has undoubtedly stretched our collective resources.
The lesson is clear on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe should do better. This is the theme both of the ESDI strand within NATO and the provision of a military underpinning to the CFSP. It is why we have focused the European defence debate on capability.
Enhancing our collective capability to act is a demanding goal. But there is a growing recognition among European nations that too many of our armed forces are structured to meet the threats of the Cold War, rather than the requirements of the future.
We no longer face an overwhelming, monolithic threat to our continent. Therefore we do not need a defence posture that emphasises being ‘dug in’ with large static formations. But we do need to deploy more rapidly and more flexibly to meet unpredictable and complex threats to our common interests. We expect operations rarely to be in a purely national context, but often in a multinational one.
These factors as a consequence place new demands on our armed forces. We need them to be readily and rapidly deployable, so that we can reach a potential crisis area in time, and in sufficient strength, to make a difference. We need to be able to sustain these forces for extended periods away from home bases, often in areas where the local infrastructure is insufficient to provide anything other than the most basic means of support.
We need armed forces that can turn their hands and equipment to a variety of tasks and challenges. We need to be able to work closely with the armed forces of other nations.
Deployability, sustainability, flexibility. Mobility, survivability, interoperability. The characteristics required of our forces today are rapidly becoming a mantra in defence circles. How are we turning them into a reality?
Nationally, we are continuing to make progress on the implementation of our Strategic Defence Review, building on the needs and missions I have just outlined. We have focused, for example, on the creation of a pool of highly capable Joint Rapid Reaction Forces, the acquisition of more strategic lift assets and on improving the deployability of troops and logistic and support chains. In due course, the two planned larger aircraft carriers, and new amphibious ships, will add reach and flexibility from a maritime perspective.
On the multilateral front, NATO’s Defence Capabilities Initiative, launched at the 50th Anniversary Summit in Washington, focuses on improving those same characteristics of the Allies’ armed forces. And in a European context, the Western European Union is conducting an audit of military capabilities, which will help us to identify in more detail Europe’s collective capability shortfalls and problems. It will be no surprise if this audit comes to similar conclusions both about shortfalls in capabilities and on the need to do better.
This all sounds like collusion between NATO and the European institutions. And of course it is! That indeed is the point. That we use these organisational frameworks to reinforce each other not to compete.
More recently, the UK/Italian Summit in July proposed the development of European defence capability criteria. This is an idea that grows out of the DCI and audit approaches. The desire to improve can be given a push a political push - by the impetus of defining concrete goal. We have a sense of this goal from the list of Petersberg tasks first adopted by the WEU in 1992 , from the Balkan experience of the last decade and from the shortfalls we are analysing through NATO and in the WEU audit.
Broadly speaking, the most demanding of the Petersberg missions could require a corps- sized deployment. This is simple enough to say and I believe that a goal of that order would achieve a wide consensus.
But we are not there yet and of course it begs a number of questions. Questions of capability, infrastructure, logistic support, sustainability and readiness. These are matters that need further thought. Not to mention national contributions, performance progress criteria and a method of monitoring and energising progress towards this goal.
These are the same essential components that underpin the DCI. So it will make sense to use that process and the NATO planning process to pull these strands together. As I said a moment ago, the European perspective can give the aim of capability improvement a political push. But it does not need to and should not create a new planning bureaucracy.
These are early days and we have much work to do to establish which performance criteria will most readily lead to improvements in capability. We think that we should focus on measures such as deployability and sustainability - the results of our investment. We should be cautious about having too many criteria or about having criteria which measure inputs only. There is a risk of becoming distracted from the main purpose of the initiative. We will need a package and some criteria will resonate more in some nations than others.
While the way ahead is about capabilities, we also recognise that the way ahead lies through organisations. I , of course, am about to recognise the full force of this observation! But speaking today, still as the United Kingdom’s defence Secretary, let me state something that I will be able to welcome wholeheartedly from Brussels next week.
NATO remains the cornerstone of our security and defence policy. Europe must be able to field a stronger and more coherent contribution to it."
NATO will retain the additional dimension of collective defence of its members. And it will also, as set out in the updated strategic concept published in Washington, have a role in crisis management operations. In this role, it will be the organisation to which we turn when Europeans and Americans see their common interests at stake, and wish to act together. Just as we have in Kosovo.
But we want to ensure that strong and effective military resources are also available to the European Union. So that we can take action in support of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, when NATO as a whole is not engaged militarily. This means that we need to develop the EU’s capacity to take timely and informed decisions on emerging crises. This commitment gives rise to some important organisational consequences.
In June, EU Heads of State and Government, agreed that that the EU should be able to take decisions on conflict prevention and crisis management tasks. And they identified the politico-military components needed to do this, including a new Political and Security Committee, a European Military Committee and a supporting European Military Staff. These should become part of the standing machinery of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
We are working on the precise roles and composition of these new bodies, and on the detailed procedures for the planning and conduct of EU-led operations. Clearly, the defence bodies must be able to support sensible defence decision making. But they must not duplicate NATO. And the new arrangements must take full account of the interests of those European nations who are not EU Member States, in particular those six who are NATO Allies.
But the bulk of the military resources and assets for planning and conducting EU-led operations will come from NATO. At Washington, NATO welcomed the EU’s aspirations, and announced that it stood ready to develop arrangements that would allow the EU ready access to its collective assets and capabilities. We are also taking forward work defining the practicalities of these arrangements, which will enable the EU to draw on a wide range of capable and proven multinational military resources.
We are looking to make progress on all of this work by the end of year. We want rapid progress but we also want good progress with all the players working positively together. This will be a busy autumn, and I look forward to playing my full part as NATO Secretary General.
I note that the title of this conference is NATO: Development in Partnership. Throughout the topics advertised in the different sessions, the words ‘partner’ and ‘ally’ crop up again and again. These are the fundamentals of the organisational strand to this initiative.
These ideas - of ‘partnership’ and ‘alliance’ - are the political strength that must be mobilised on both sides of the Atlantic as we carry this project forward. We must not lose sight of this as we grapple with the labyrinthine arguments about committees and terms of reference and levels of representation.
In this spirit I look forward to working with all the friends and colleagues I have had in Europe, the USA and Canada in my present job and also very much to working closely with my soon-to-be predecessor at NATO, Javier Solana, in his new role as the EU’s High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Strong working links between the EU and NATO will be essential if this initiative is to succeed.
But if we are to make progress, our agenda must be comprehensible and not just in the Defence village hospitality tent. And the necessary resources must be provided to support it. I propose a test for all discussions on building military capabilities the MOF test. What we say, and what we aim for must be intelligible to the average Minister of Finances. It is a tough test but if we do not pass it, the added cash we need for added security simply will not be there in time.
Of course this is a challenge. But Europe needs to face up to its security responsibilities both within NATO and, where necessary, on its own account. Europe can be a force for good in the world. But we can do better than we do now. We must be stronger. We must be more efficient. We must cooperate more fully. Possession of both the will and the means to maintain security will be the best guarantee of a positive future both for our Partnerships and for our Alliances.
|
