Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

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[Lord Teverson]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report of the European Union Committee on European Defence Capabilities: lessons from the past, signposts for the future (31st Report, Session 2010–12, HL Paper 292).

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, we move from the defence of circus animals to the defence of the half a billion people who reside within the European Union and perhaps those beyond as well. I shall give a brief background, although noble Lords will be aware of most of it, to give a context and then go through some of our key recommendations and move forward from there to what I, as committee chair, see as the most important issues to be addressed in this area.

We should remember that the CSDP is very recent. It is just over 10 years old. In many ways, it arose out of the brave movement of the St Malo agreement, which took a lot of people by surprise at the time, and we could perhaps objectively and critically say that it did not fulfil its potential at the time.

In a way, there was an important area in which clarity of definition was made before that, in 1992 as part of the Western European Union, namely, the Petersberg tasks. It is important to remember what those are. They are all around humanitarian assistance, conflict prevention and peacekeeping, crisis management and peacemaking, and post-conflict stabilisation. To this day, I think that describes very well the role and the expanse of European Union defence capability and vision.

One thing that the European Union is certainly not about, nor does it intend at any time soon to be about, is territorial defence of the “homeland” of Europe from external threats. In fact, that is one of the problems in the defence world, because the majority of Europe’s population—although not all of it—do not see any conventional, external territorial threat to member states of the European Union, the exception being still the nervousness of some central and eastern European states, which understandably are still very nervous about the instability—in a political sense, and certainly in a long-term sense—of the Russian Federation and perhaps its longer-term issues and challenges. However, there is no commonly agreed external territorial threat. That makes it very difficult during a time of budget cuts and restraints and all the difficulties where social programmes are being squeezed at the moment, where some European states, such as the Republic of Ireland within an EU context, are under huge pressures fiscally. Clearly defence has to take a hit out of that as well, so we have a difficult situation at the moment.

There are three current missions: Operation Althea in Bosnia, which has been there for some time now; Somali piracy, which we have discussed in Grand Committee a number of times; and the more recent Somali training operation, which takes place in Uganda. There is likely to be a future Mali mission very soon as well. In the past there have been a mission in Macedonia, two missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a mission in Chad. Some of those missions have not been very comfortable, if you like, not almost civilian, take-it-easy missions. They have a hard edge to them. Some of our witnesses made it very clear that if fighting had to take place it would have done. They are the same troops that are used in NATO operations in Afghanistan and operations in Iraq. They are the same people, the same military forces, and are capable of taking those sorts of actions.

Perhaps it is worth looking at some of the statistics, because we are not always aware of the importance of European defence. For instance, we were told by witnesses that one-third of global defence expenditure outside the United States is European. It has just been overtaken by China, but we are big spenders in terms of defence. In terms of military personnel, more than 1.5 million of our citizens are in uniform in the European Union, and that is greater than in the United States. On the other side of that, we are atrocious in terms of research and investment in weaponry. The rather fuzzy statistic that came out to us is that probably three-quarters of those 1.6 million personnel are non-deployable, and that is one of the themes that I want to come back to in my opening address on this area.

The other issue that noble Lords will be aware of is that European defence expenditure is dominated by two member states, France and the United Kingdom. In reality only those two member states are willing and able within a reasonable timeframe to wage rather more aggressive campaigns where necessary outside our territory. There are very few others that are able to take that strain. Again, that theme might cause difficulty in the future.

The other part of the context is, “a changing world”. I have already talked about the budgetary side, which affects not just Europe but the United States, although perhaps not so much some of the Pacific nations. However, what is clear apart from that is the change of stance of the United States in a way that has been utterly predictable since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989. That is that future security priorities for the United States will be in the Pacific theatre. They will not be within Europe; and the United States—and I am sure that this will be the case whichever Administration take charge in Washington at the beginning of next year—will have to make major budgetary cuts, programmed at the moment at some $0.5 trillion over the present budget-programming period. So we have a very different scenario in that area.

There is a different philosophy, to a degree, within the United States which is the idea—denied by some of our American witnesses—of leading from behind. The US, in the Libyan operation, had to provide the resources that were necessary—there were European capability gaps—while saying, “Europe, this is on your doorstep. You have to take the operational strain of this, once we have started the operation”. Surprise, surprise, the United Kingdom, France and some of our closer allies managed to deliver, at least on that ask.

I will consider some of the main recommendations, but before I do so, I should mention that one of our final sentences and one of the things that was clearest to us as a committee as we went through this, was the obvious and fundamental discovery that member states and nation states within Europe make decisions about defence, their budgets and how they co-ordinate their forces with other nation states. Because of that, anything that is good for Europe, in terms of better and more effective defence expenditure, is good for NATO—and that is equally good for the European Union and any other bilateral or multilateral organisation or alliance that takes place. These are not alternatives but win-win situations if we get them right. So the institutional arguments can be a destructive distraction from some of the key issues.

I shall quickly go through some of the main areas in the report. As regards NATO versus the European Union, one of the areas that the External Affairs Sub-committee has been concerned about on many occasions is the inability of the EU and NATO in terms of military forces to work together at operational level because of the difficulties over Turkey, Cyprus and so on. Certainly as regards Afghanistan, we found that that actually threatened the lives of European civilian operational staff in terms of carrying out their duties. That to us is fundamentally unacceptable. We of course say that a resolution to this has to be found. We obviously have the Berlin Plus agreement under which the EU can use NATO resources, when agreed by NATO. They are currently still used in Bosnia—that was agreed some time ago—but there is no prospect of similar co-operation in the future. We need to resolve it, and both sides of the argument know that.

Another area that came out as regards NATO was that Europe has to pull its weight and contribute to NATO, otherwise America will lose interest in it. Something I had not thought about before, not being a defence expert, was that NATO is a unique organisation. There is no other similar integrated organisation, certainly not since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which enables the United States to operate so closely with allies. However, we should not take it for granted and feel relaxed as a consequence.

An area that the press took up when the report was released was the role of Germany. We were critical of Germany’s 1.5% defence expenditure, but perhaps more so of its reserved position in the Security Council over Libya. We feel strongly that European defence cannot work properly without Germany playing a full part in it. However, some witnesses made it very clear that some nations within the European Union might be concerned if Germany increased defence expenditure to 2%, but we think that is well and truly a risk worth taking.

We welcome the UK-France model and the two defence treaties of 2010. We think this is a potential model for use in other areas. It shows that Europe is serious about defence and combining its defence capabilities. It is not the only example of that in Europe but it is certainly the most important one. However, there is a risk that the rest of the European Union will say, “France and the United Kingdom get on with it. You do it very well. That is your role. We are not up to that. We will retreat back out of that”. We believe that that could cause much concern in the future.

As regards the staffing of CSDP missions, we are very aware that resource targets for civilian missions are never met. This is degrading for the image of the European Union. European Union civilian or military missions are always exceedingly small compared with NATO operations and their modest resource needs must be met. It is outrageous that medical support was not obtained in the Uganda-Somali operation. That is unacceptable. In Operation Atalanta, there was very little air surveillance, but it was finally provided by Luxembourg. Large capability gaps were evident in the Libyan operation in surveillance, air-to-air refuelling, transport, medical support and smart munitions. Clearly, Europe needs to operate much better in that area. It is strange, or perhaps not, that battle groups have not been used. However, for them to have credibility they have to be audited, as they would be in NATO. When there is an opportunity to use them, as there has been, they should be used where that is appropriate.

The biggest message that came out of the report concerns deployment. The irony is that if Europe spent its financial resources and deployed people slightly more effectively, and deployed them in different places, and co-ordinated what each nation did, it could be amazingly effective even on reduced resources resulting from budget cuts. That must be the main message that comes out of this report.

Europe needs a defence capability. There are a number of models: the EU model; the NATO model; and multilateral and bilateral models. That is great; none of those opposes each other. What is good for the EU is good for NATO and is good for Europe. We must get that deployment right. Europe has to stand up for itself and be able to show that it is prepared to defend itself.

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[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, first, I want to thank my noble friend for a positive and considered reply to this report, which I strongly welcome. I will be very brief. We have heard some excellent speeches and some memorable ones. It is the first time I have heard the “w” word used in a Lords debate but, as the report said, we live in changing times. So there we are.

I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for participating in the debate because he provided an anchor of real experience in this whole area. I take the criticism from the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, because some of it is correct. What we tried to achieve, and one of the things that came out in this report, was clarity. What it showed to us as a sub-committee was that where there was difficulty in understanding the whole picture, when you put all those pieces of the jigsaw together, it not only made a picture but made sense as well. Many of those arguments are repeated, but they are important. Many noble Lords mentioned the comment that taxpayers are being short-changed, and that was the strongest message that came out of today. That Britain should and can lead in this area in the European Union is for sure.

On the nuclear side, I apologise to my noble friend Lady Miller that we did not mention nuclear. Perhaps that should have been there. It is not, as such, an EU competence in terms of strike forces, but one of the UK-French defence treaties is specifically around the nuclear side, and we should deal with that.

The point on A400M was a quote from our evidence. I think everyone recognised the severe problems with A400M and all the lessons that needed to be learnt. The committee has responsibilities with the French Parliament in looking at the UK-French defence treaties. One of the core things that we are concerned about there, as the Minister said, is that we should not go from two, where we collaborate, to a point where that complexity becomes great again so that we cannot deliver programmes of the right sort on time and on budget.

Lastly, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, that he gave me great insight into Question Time in this House by saying that one should hang back to see who else speaks. Today I started to speak over my noble friend Lady Trumpington, and that was one of the biggest mistakes that I have ever made in my career in this House. I withdrew very quickly.

I thank noble Lords very much indeed for an excellent debate. I thank the clerk, Kathryn Colvin, and her small team for all the work that they did in bringing this report together. I commend the report to the Grand Committee.

Motion agreed.