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European Parliament study on military research: EU should get ready for war 1.4.16

01 April 2016

A report commissioned by the European Parliament calls for the EU to make significant investment in new weapons and military systems in order to reverse decreases in military investment at national level and ensure that the EU has "strategic autonomy" in order to act as a "security provider".

The report: European Parliament Directorate-General for External Policies, The future of EU defence research, March 2016 (pdf)

The report was commissioned examine the "options for designing, developing and implementing an EU level defence research programme, to describe the process depicting the objectives, content, and budget of such a programme, as well as its potential consequences on transatlantic relations."

It warns repeatedly of the "dire consequences" of declining EU Member State investment in defence research and procurement of weaponry and other military systems, and recommends that the EU set up a fully-fledged military budget of "between EUR 500 million per year and EUR 3.3 billion per year on defence R&T [research and technology]."

Declining investment in European defence research and procurement worries the authors, who argue that:

"After two decades of underinvestment, those fatal trends will have dire consequences. European defence companies will lack the technological ability to build the next generation weapons due to the absence of technological building blocs such as robotics, artificial intelligence, swarm weapons systems, lasers, infrared retinas, space surveillance and over the horizon radars… not to mention missile defence and ultra-sophisticated command and control systems."

This will negatively effect Europe's arms and military industry: it "will lose global competitiveness, exports markets, highly qualified jobs and industrial facilities". But this is apparently not the worst of it:

"the main effect of this underinvestment will be political and military. The Union’s ambition to achieve ‘strategic autonomy’ and be a ‘security provider’ for its citizens will remain empty words, whereas the world around the EU keeps evolving fast."

Repeated mention is made of increasing Russian, Chinese and US investment in weaponry and military systems:

"For the fiscal year 2017, the US Defense Secretary has recently announced that EUR 67 billion will be requested in defence R&D appropriations. China’s defence research budget is assessed to be slightly more than twice the size of the EU, at around EUR 20 billion. At constant rate of increase, some think tanks estimate that it will overpass the US’s by 2022. Finally, the Russian defence R&D budget has doubled between 2012 and 2015. The conclusion is self-evident: a step change in the scale of Europe’s R&D budget is urgent, and no single European country is financially capable to undertake it. Common Union action is therefore imperative."

The report makes a number of recommendations:

• "The Union should launch an ambitious European Defence Research Action Plan (EDRAP) consistent with the ‘Global Strategy’ that will be issued in June 2016 by High Representative Federica Mogherini, and the Commission Defence Action Plan expected by the end of 2016."
• "Within the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2021-2027), the Union should launch a dedicated EDRP including also higher TRLs (TRL 3 to 7) and reflecting its level of ambition with regard to CSDP."
• "In order to give birth to sound defence procurement programmes, a second step of the EDRP should be taken by 2023-2025, including co-financing by the Union and its Member States e.g. under the aegis of article 185 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), to produce operational demonstrators (TRL 7 & 8)."
• "To implement this action plan, the European Defence Agency is the natural institutional agent of the Union. However, EDA as is stands today will not be able to play this role with a budget capped at EUR 30 million per year and unanimity as its standard mode of decision-making. Thus, the Union should reconsider both the means and the governance of EDA and design the governance to fit the programme, not the programme to fit the governance."
• "The Union shall strengthen its CDSP ‘planning process’, building on scattered existing components. For this, the Global strategy should be followed by a defence sub-strategy (or ‘white paper’ or ‘white book’) setting the Union’s level of ambition and answering the question: what does the Union want to be able to achieve militarily? This new document shall then be followed by a brand new Capability Development Plan, matching capabilities with the Union’s new level of ambition in a top down approach."
• "Ways and means for the EDRP to give birth to decisive defence programmes must be explored. The aforementioned co-financing by the Union and Member States is certainly the most significant way to tighten the link of defence research with defence programmes."
• "More broadly, all the legal aspects must be clarified prior to the launch of the EDRP in 2021, whether this is through the expected Commission Defence Action Plan or otherwise."

Given the history of cooperative military programmes in Europe, the authors' proposals seem rather ambitious, to say the least. Nevertheless, the EU has taken an increased interest in developing its "strategic autonomy" in recent years. Most recently, a "Group of Personalities" made up of arms company executives and high-level state and EU officials made a number of similiar arguments to the EP report. The next steps are likely to be outlined in the forthcoming reports from Federica Mogherini (due in June 2016) and the European Commission (by the end of 2016) noted above.

Background and further reading

• New "GoP" advance need for EU "military research", Statewatch News Online (March 2016)
• Commission proposes military research programme, Statewatch News Online (August 2014)