The EDA and military capability development: making pooling and sharing work

Abstract

Despite the financial crisis, Member States still have international responsibilities to fulfil, particularly those with a high international standing. Meanwhile a number of operations both under the European Union (EU) as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) have underlined that EU Member States suffer from a shortfall in core capabilities such as Air-to-Air Refuelling (AAR) and command and control. In this respect tools such as Pooling and Sharing (P&S) could allow the Member States to do more with less whilst being able to increase interoperability. However, the success of such initiatives depends on whether Member States are willing to pursue capability development within the EU as well as the ability of the European Defence Agency (EDA) to act as a motor in this field. This chapter seeks to analyse the prospects for the practical development of P&S projects as envisaged by the Ghent Initiative in 2010. It will do so by assessing the implementation of the initiative to date as well as underlining where the pitfalls lie. In particular the economic crisis could be used not only to reinvigorate defence capability collaboration but also as a reason to cut defence budgets and procurement programmes without then working collaboratively with other Member States to produce the necessary items. The idea here is that Member States still need to invest money to pool and share. This brings about the second pitfall – that of political will. As the EU Battlegroups have shown, developing capabilities does not mean an increased willingness to use them. The economic crisis could mean that political willingness even to develop capabilities could be lacking. Our aim is to ascertain the support among key Member States for P&S as well as how the EDA has been managing the project. In a second step we seek to understand why certain procurement and training initiatives under P&S are chosen and what role the EDA has in bringing together a strategic vision concerning projects. To analyse this we utilise European strategic culture as an analytical approach. Within it we show that there is a clash in vision concerning in which forum to produce capabilities, whichin turn means that P&S is based on a case by case basis rather than being shaped by any overall strategic vision. However, some hope is emerging not least because the individual cases sometimes emerge as a result of lessons learnt from operations – though not always EU ones. Thus the Member States, through this piecemeal process, are beginning to understand the types of operations it will be involved in and where capability gaps are emerging within this. A desire to work through the EU to solve these gaps also indicates an increasing preparedness to see the EU as an appropriate forum for capability development and in turn a defence actor. This could indicate that some of these conflicting visions are being overcome, leading in time to a more developed European strategic culture which bases defence capability development on when, where and with whom the EU wishes to use force.