Capabilities traps and gaps: symptom or cause of a troubled transatlantic relationship?

Abstract

The identification of critical capabilities shortfalls has elicited substantially different ‘to do’ lists in NATO, the European Union, and national defence ministry policies and initiatives. Moreover, these capabilities shortfalls have proven to be moving targets, particularly since American military primacy allows the United States to define the terms of the capabilities debate. The emerging transformation of American armed forces has aggravated the pre-existing ‘capabilities gaps’. An important question arises: do these gaps represent the continuation of free-riding within the alliance or reflect a more fundamental divergence between the strategic cultures and practice of statecraft in the United States and in Europe? NATO's future may depend upon whether the capabilities gaps that exist are structural or time-dependent, upon whether those gaps represent different understandings of security in the post-Cold War world, and upon whether the capabilities debate reflects a set of capability gaps that need to be redressed or a set of capability traps to which the Europeans have fallen prey.

Notes

Secretary of Defense, Annual Industrial Capabilities Report to the Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004), pp.1–6.

White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington DC: The White House, 2002) (hereafter NSS).

These four themes are investigated in Robert Jervis, ‘Understanding the Bush Doctrine’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol.118, No.3 (2003), pp.365–88.

North Atlantic Council (hereafter NAC), ‘Defence Capabilities Initiative’, Press Release NAC-S(99)69, Brussels, NATO, 1999; NAC, ‘Statement on the Defence Capabilities Initiative’, Press Release M-NAC-D-1 (2001) 89, at <;www.nato.int/docu/pr/2001/p01-0893.htm>; and NAC, ‘Communiqué’, Prague NATO summit, 21–22 November 2002, in Jean-Yves Haine, From Laeken to Copenhagen. European Defence: Core Documents, Vol.III (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2003), p.158.

‘Joint Declaration Launching European Defence Capabilities Initiative, UK–Italian Summit’, July 1999, at <http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk>.

WEU Audit of Assets and Capabilities for European Crisis Management Operations. Recommendations For Strengthening European Capabilities for Crisis Management Operations, November 1999, at <http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/>.

Petersberg Declaration (London: Western European Union, 1992), para. 4, part II.

See Javier Solana, EU High Representative for the CSFP, ‘Remarks’, at the informal meeting of EU defence ministers, 5–6 April 2004, Brussels.

See Ministry of Defence, Strategic Defence Review, at <http://www.mod.uk/issues/sdr/>, Ministry of Defence, The Strategic Defence Review: A New Chapter (London: The Stationery Office, 2002), pp.14–18 and Ministry of Defence, Delivering Security in a Changing World: Defence White Paper (London: The Stationary Office, 2003), p.2.

See Thomas-Durell Young, ‘Post-unification German Military Organisation: The Struggle to Create National Command Structures’, in James Sperling (ed.), Germany at 55: Bonn ist nicht Berlin? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.325–47.

Delivering Security in a Changing World, pp.4–5 and 8.

‘French Defence Overview’, at <http://www.ambafrance-us.org/sp/intheus/defense/defense_sp.asp>; ‘Reform of French National Defence’, at <http://www.ambafrance-us.org/atoz>.

This point is made by both Rob de Wijk and Anand Menon, who attribute the problem, respectively, to the organizational weakness of the EU and to different decision-making cultures within NATO and the EU. See Rob de Wijk, ‘Convergence Criteria’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol.6 (2000), p.414; Anand Menon, ‘Why ESDP is Misguided and Dangerous to the Alliance’, in Jolyon Howorth and John Keeler (eds), Defending Europe: The EU, NATO and the Quest for European Autonomy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp.209–11.

The second of these aspects is most fully covered in de Wijk, ‘Convergence Criteria’; Antonio Missiroli, ‘Ploughshares into Swords? Euros for European Defense’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol.8 (2003), pp.5–33; and Jolyon Howorth, ‘Why ESDP is Necessary and Beneficial for the Alliance’, in Howorth and Keeler, Defending Europe, pp.219–38.

Howorth, ‘Why ESDP is Necessary and Beneficial for the Alliance’, p.231.

François Heisbourg et al., ‘The European Industrial Base and ESDP’, in Prospects on the European Defence Industry (Athens: Defence Analysis Institute, 2003), p.15.

Missiroli, ‘Ploughshares into Swords?’, p.7; and IISS, The Military Balance, 2003–2004 (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.243–4.

In the period 1949–64, the defence budget as a share of GDP averaged 10.5 per cent for the US, 8.31 per cent for the United Kingdom, 8.03 per cent for France, 5.16 per cent for the FRG, and 4.44 per cent for Italy. Data drawn from Jacques van Ypersele de Strihou, ‘Sharing the Defense Burden Among Western Allies’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.49 (1967), p.528, table 1.

Defence budgets declined to an average of 4.0 per cent of GDP for the United States, 3.3 per cent for the United Kingdom, 3.15 per cent for France, 1.85 per cent for the FRG, and 2.0 per cent for Italy. See NATO, ‘Table 3: Defence expenditures as % of gross domestic product’, at <http://www.nato.int/docu/>.

‘Defence expenditures as % of gross domestic product’.

‘Finanzplanung Einzelplan 14’, at <http://www.bundeswehr.de/pic/forces/040623_500_finanzplan114.gif>; SIPRI, SIPRI Yearbook 2003 (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), table 10.7, p.316. For a detailed study of the German case in comparative perspective, see Franz-Josef Meiers, ‘A German Defence Review’, in Gordon Wilson (ed.), European Force Structures, Occasional Paper 8 (Paris: WEU Institute for Security Studies, 1999), pp.20–36.

See van Ypersele de Strihou, ‘Sharing the Defense Burden Among Western Allies’, p.532, table 6.

Raw data on R&D spending is drawn from ‘Annex B: Transatlantic Comparisons on Defense Spending’, in Jean-Paul Béchat and Felix Rohatyn (eds), The Future of the Transatlantic Defense Community (Washington DC: CSIS, 2003), p.58.

See also Joachim Rhode and Markus Frenzel, ‘Transatlantic Gaps and European Armaments Cooperation’, in Prospects on the European Defence Industry, p.64; for US figures see IISS, The Military Balance 2003–2004, p.237, table 7.

Cited in Robert Bell, ‘Military matters: Enhancing Alliance Capabilities’, NATO Review, No. 2 (2002), at <http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2002/issue2/english/military.html>.

Peter Stålenheim, ‘Appendix 10B: NATO Military Expenditure, by Category’, SIPRI Yearbook 2003, pp.360–62.

See Secretary of Defense, Report on Allied Contributions to the Common Defense, July 2003 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), table C-4, p.C-5 and table D-8, p.D-9. Other data drawn from NATO, ‘Table 5: Distribution of Defence Expenditures by Category’, at <http://www.nato.int/docu/>.

For a fuller discussion, see Rhode and Frenzel, ‘Transatlantic Gaps and European Armaments Cooperation’, p.71.

Ratios found in Heisbourg et al., ‘The European Industrial Base and ESDP’, pp.57–8. For a full discussion of the procurement gap, see ‘Final Report of Working Group VIII on Defence (Barnier Report)’, in Haine, From Laeken to Copenhagen, p.263.

Simon Duke, ‘CESDP and the EU Response to 11 September: Identifying the Weakest Link’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol.7 (2002), p.166; and Rhode and Frenzel, ‘Transatlantic Gaps and European Armaments Cooperation’, p.62.

See Béchat and Rohatyn, The Future of the Transatlantic Defense Community, p.x and p.11; and Antonio Missiroli, ‘Mind the Gaps – Across the Atlantic and the Union’, in Gustav Lindstrom (ed.), Shift or Rift: Assessing US–EU Relations after Iraq (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2003), p.78.

In June 2004 it was reported that a satellite intelligence sharing agreement had been signed between the US and the Europeans. Financial Times, 22 June 2004.

Data drawn from Secretary of Defense, Annual Industrial Capabilities Report, pp.35–6.

Robert Hunter and George Joulwan, New Capabilities: Transforming NATO Forces (Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council of the United States, 2002), p.9.

See Future Military Coalitions: The Transatlantic Challenge. Report of a French–German–UK–US Working Group (Arlington, VA: US-CREST, 2002), Appendix A, pp.57–61.

According to one estimate, the EU will be capable of carrying out autonomous military operations across the combat spectrum by 2015 in virtually every category of capability and redress existing shortfalls to carry out low- to medium-intensity combat operations by 2005. Future Military Coalitions, pp.80–84.

White House, National Security Strategy; European Commission, A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy (Brussels: European Commission, 2003).

Javier Solana, ‘The EU Security Strategy: Implications for Europe's Role in a Changing World’, at <http://www.foreignpolicy.org.tr/eng/eu/solana_121103.htm>.

See European Union, the Secretariat, Working Group VIII (Defence), ‘Introductory Note by the Secretariat on the Military Capabilities which could be Available to the European Union’, Working Document 1, WG VIII-WD 1, Brussels, 20 September 2002; and Bernard von Plate, Die Zukunft des transatlantischen Verhältnisses: Mehr also die NATO (Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, 2003), p.11.

See ‘Franco-German Defence and Security Council Declaration’, Freibourg, 12 June 2001, in Maartje Rutten (ed.), From St-Malo to Nice. European Defence: Core Documents, Vol.I, Chaillot Paper 47 (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2001), p.20; and ‘Speech by Jacques Chirac’, Institute for Higher Defence Studies, Paris, 8 June 2001, in Rutten, From St-Malo to Nice, p.16.

This point is made in Duke, ‘CESDP and the EU Response to 11 September’, p.166; and Missiroli, ‘Mind the Gaps’, p.77.

See White House, NSS, p.25.

The NATO defence ministers accepted that Europeans should reprioritize defence budgets, reduce force levels and shift resources to weapons modernization, and increase the overall size of national defence budgets. See NAC, ‘Statement on Capabilities’, Press Release (2002)074, Brussels, NATO, June 2002.

A full statement is found in Council of the European Union, Göteberg European Council Presidency Report on the European Security and Defence Policy, DG E VIII, 9526/1/01, Brussels, 11 June 2001, Annex I, Police Action Plan and Annex III to the Annex, New Concrete Targets for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management.

Congressional Budget Office, NATO Burdensharing after Enlargement (Washington, DC: CBO, 2001), p.11.

See Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Striking a New Transatlantic Bargain’, Foreign Affairs, Vol.82, No.4 (2003), pp.74–89; Menon, ‘Why ESDP is Misguided and Dangerous to the Alliance’, p.214; and Howorth, ‘Why ESDP is Necessary and Beneficial for the Alliance’, p.234.

Heisbourg et al., European Defence, p.27.

NAC, ‘Statement on Capabilities’, Press Release (2002)074; US Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Marc Grossman, ‘New Capabilities, New Members, New Relationships’, NATO Review, No. 2 (2002), at <http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2002/issue2/english/art2.html>.

UK Parliament, Select Committee on Defence, Seventh Report (2002), p.135, at <http://www.parliament.the-stationary-office.co.uk>.

Defence Select Committee, Seventh Report, p.136.

Andrew Cottey, Timothy Edmunds and Anthony Forster, ‘Beyond Prague’, NATO Review, No.3 (2002), at <http://www.nato.int/review>.

The duplication debate is ‘a discussion on the degree of independence from the US that is best for Europe … and on the sincerity and strength of the American commitment towards its European allies’. See Heisbourg et al., European Defence, p.32.

The group consisted of Belgium, France, the FRG and Luxembourg. ‘Conclusions of European Defence Meeting’, 29 April 2003, Egmont Palace, Belgium, at <http://www.foreignpolicy>.

The next generation weapons systems will require ‘financial resources, well beyond the capability of European firms’. Heisbourg et al., ‘The European Industrial Base and ESDP’, p.14; and Heisbourg et al., Prospects on the European Defence Industry, p.66.