Will it last? Strengthening European defence capabilities

Earlier this week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz invited neighbouring nations to take part in a “jointly developed air defence system” during a speech at the Charles University in Prague.

Interesting to most defence commentators was the Chancellor’s mea culpa regarding German military investment, acknowledging that the country had undergone a “fundamental change of heart” arising from the invasion of Ukraine.

Already, Germany has pledged €100 billion to modernise the Bundeswehr which is expected to include the purchase of F-35 systems to replace the country’s ageing fleet of Tornados.

The proposed air defence system, according to the Chancellor, is designed to overcome a substantial weakness in Europe’s air and space defence capabilities.

“All of those capabilities will be deployable within the framework of NATO. At the same time, Germany will, from the very start, design that future air defence in such a way that our European neighbours can be involved if desired – such as the Poles, Balts, Netherlanders, Czechs, Slovaks or our Scandinavian partners,” the Chancellor said at the Charles University in Prague.

“Not only would a jointly developed air defence system in Europe be more efficient and cost-effective than if each of us built our own costly and highly complex systems; it would also be a security gain for Europe as a whole, and an outstanding example of what we mean when we talk about strengthening the European pillar within NATO.”

Though, it is unclear whether the increase in defence expenditure will be sufficient to overcome decades of underinvestment in Europe’s security architecture.

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According to a new Center for Strategic & International Studies brief written by Max Bergmann, Colin Wall, Sean Monaghan and Pierre Marcos: while new investment in Europe’s security capabilities is welcomed, the continent nevertheless requires a fundamental reset in long-term defence planning to ensure that recent budget windfalls translate into security enhancements.

According to the analysts, following the Cold War, Europe’s modern security architecture pivoted “from hypothetical conflict against a peer adversary to expeditionary operations focused on crisis management, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism.”

Such policy changes allowed Western governments to scale down their forces, without fundamentally weakening their capabilities relative to potential adversaries.

Earlier in the year, Wall and Marcos penned similar thoughts in War on the Rocks.

The pair detailed the impacts of European “sea blindness” on war readiness, as European militaries shifted their focus to non-state actors and sub-state conflict.

“Against this backdrop, European navies lost 32 per cent of their main surface combatants (frigates and destroyers) between 1999 and 2018. Collectively, Europeans had 197 large surface combatants and 129 submarines in 1990 but only 116 and 66, respectively in 2021,” the pair illuminated earlier in the year.

The recent years have left Europe’s militaries ill-prepared to face adversaries in a peer-to-peer conflict.

While NATO and the European Union have made strides to improve their security architectures, which includes Finland and Sweden’s admittance into NATO as well as greater troop deployments, the analysts suggest that there is no guarantee that increased readiness will be a long-term fixture of European strategic planning.

“However, the opportunity for bold action on European defense will not remain forever. Europe has many other policy priorities: post-COVID economic recovery, migration, climate change and the energy transition, and tackling inflation, to name a few,” the analysts contend.

Such concerns are no trivial distractions.

Between May 2021 and May 2022, producer prices in Germany increased by a reported 33.6 percent – with energy being a leading driver of price growth at 87.1 per cent.

Not only do such stark figures illustrate a marked increase in the price of civilian output, but also herald a substantial increase in the costs of military maintenance, innovation and industrial capability.

In March, Germany’s federal office of statistics confirmed that prices “for energy produced in Germany” during the previous year increased by 68 per cent.

As defence struggles for primacy within national budgets, the analysts further contend that late spikes in defence expenditure may not be sufficient to overcome previous budget cuts.

“Even though European partners started to increase their defense budgets again in 2015 … primarily in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they had dug themselves an incredibly deep hole. Over the last two decades, European militaries have lost 35 percent of their capabilities.”

Interestingly, the report also challenges modern trends in force planning that prioritise quality over quantity.

While Ukrainian operations have demonstrated the impact of distributed lethality in large-scale conventional combat, statistics nevertheless illustrate the need for scalability in the event of peer-to-peer conflict.

“Russia itself might attest to this: according to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russian military may have lost 1,500 tanks, 3,600 armoured vehicles, 750 artillery pieces, and 210 aircraft between the beginning of the invasion and the end of June,” the briefing outlines.

Scale is still needed.

Despite this, over recent years, NATO militaries have prioritised streamlining their capabilities.

Under the British government’s force structure plan, Downing Street has resolved to reduce the size of the British Army by 9,500 soldiers to 72,500 by 2025. Such a reduction marks the smallest British Army since 1714.

To compensate, Downing Street hopes to court a model of qualitative advantage in which smaller units of deployed troops are supported by better technology including robot-human teaming and increased electronic warfare capabilities.

Explaining the shake-up, Lieutenant General Ralph Wooddisse, CBE, MC, noted, “Future Soldier is the next step in the evolution of the British Army; it is the most radical change for the British Army in 20 years. It will change the way we fight and operate, and make us more lethal, agile and lean.

“It will be underpinned by changes to structure, technology, and workforce. Future Soldier is fundamentally about ensuring the British Army is a competitive and resilient organisation able to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, wherever they may be.”

Militaries require long-term planning to ensure that spikes in expenditure and interest in fact make their way into improved readiness.