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EU Defense Strategy? - Owning thr body bags. - Daily Telegraph Fri 11th May/12

Politics List

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Owning the body bags

Thursday 10 May 2012

Defence cuts were briefly aired yesterday, with the news that we were to lose more of Scotland's historic regimental names, along with at least one infantry battalion.

The losses arise from a restructuring of the regular Army, to accommodate its reduction from 102,000 to 82,000 personnel by 2022 - its lowest level since the Boer war at the end of the 19th century. Amongst the famous names to go will be the Black Watch, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Royal Highland Fusiliers.

It is a sign of the times, though, that the coverage in the legacy media has been relatively modest, and the reaction muted. Back in 2004 when a similar cull was mooted, senior Army officers were reported to be "seething".

Such was the sensitivity of the issue that talk of scrapping the Black Watch and other famous names triggered fears of a mass exodus of Labour voters to the Scottish Nationalists, the subsequent climbdown sparing the Scottish regiments. But, shifting the burden to the English regiments was met with a march outside parliament and a petition with thousands of signatures.

This time round, Col. Tim Collins has entered the fray, arguing that scrapping historic regimental names is "a senseless body blow to the Army".

His thesis is a familiar one. Soldiers need courage to perform their duties effectively, which is an attribute bolstered by a feeling of clan identity. Furthermore, units that retain an identity have fewer recruitment and retention problems.

By contrast, the new regiments struggle to recruit, and the absence of the informal welfare system that characterises the traditional regiment adds to pressure that causes soldiers to leave the Army.

Collins nevertheless recognises that the changes are being forced on the Army by tight budgets, but he still argues against a system he believes has become "too European", where men are cycled through anonymous "super regiments" on a career and convenience basis, with no regional identities and uninspired by unit histories and memories of glory.

By coincidence, I was in the EU parliament Brussels last Tuesday, hearing arguments from a group of speakers about the merits of the European Common Security and Defence Policy, specifically in terms of addressing those tight budgets. These are affecting not just the UK but defence forces throughout Europe.

Under the general heading of "EU-Nato relations: complementarities or duplication", the idea was that the speakers should argue for and against the proposition that an EU military capability was a waste of resource, duplicating the efforts of Nato and thus wasting money we could ill-afford.

The thesis was put rather succinctly by an observer of the proceedings, British MEP and former soldier, Geoffrey Van Orden (pictured below - centre), who asserted that "playing soldiers is not the business of the European Union". As far as military matters go, we should "delete EU".

Contradicting him was, amongst others, Jo Coelment, Brigadier General (retd) of the Belgian Air Force, and former Belgian permanent representative to the military committee of the European Union.

Coelemont was useful in that he articulated the EU view that "pooling and sharing" capabilities was the way to overcome budgetary limitations. He saw us in transition, from individual national forces, to a disparate series of bilateral agreements, "islands of co-operation". These, he hoped, would lead to a "clustering" of defence programmes and full integration of military capabilities.

Europe, according to Coelmont, was beset by capability shortfalls, but these were not the only problem. The countries of Europe had to find a way to evolve from indifference to the concept of defence integration, to involvement and then ownership.

This, in the view of Coelment, would only stem from agreement on strategy. Hardware, the tools of war, stemmed from strategy. The United States had its own unifying strategy, so the European Union needed further to elaborate its own. We needed a "top down approach", he said. And yes, he really did say that - we need a top down approach.

There followed a Nato bureaucrat by the name of Adrian Kendry, a senior defence economist. He presented us with the problem of trying to tell the difference between the EU and the Nato viewpoint, the essential difference being that the one was talking of deeper and further integration, while Nato presented the idea of deeper and further co-operation.

The spectre was raised of "Bonzai Armies", shrunken affairs resulting from multiple cuts,. The same solution was offered, with "pooling and sharing" of national capabilities, but under the aegis of Nato rather than the EU. This has been called "smart defence", resulting in one member of the audience asking whether everything that had gone before was "dumb defence".

Kendry, like Coelman, though, was after improved consultation between the member countries on defence spending plans, taking us towards the idea of integrated defence spending. The Nato man, looking at greener grass, mooted the possibility of a new treaty along the lines of the fiscal compact, enforcing minimum levels of expenditure on defence.

This brought us back to the EU and Graham Muir, head of the policy and planning unit of the European Defence Agency (EDA). He created an apocalyptic vision of a perfect storm of declining budgets, US revision of strategy offering less support to Europe, a sub-optimal defence industrial base and then, with the contraction of US defence spending, increased competition from US defence contractors for European defence business.

It wasn't very long before we were again hearing about "pooling and sharing". Those new to the idea were acquainted with the Ghent Framework and a "permanent capability generation conference", which would result in a "permanently relevant EDA". All that led to Daniel Keohane of the FRIDE Institute in Brussels noting that none of the initiatives, going way back, had ever produced any actual new capabilities.

Some of us in the audience might have quietly assumed that, if conferences won wars, the EU was on a winner, while our Daniel is the sort of cove who asks awkward questions like "is EU defence policy dead?" Ce n'est pas évident, he says, that EU defence policy can succeed without French leadership.

Too much of this, of course, and one suddenly loses the will to live. The way to overcome all our enemies is to gather them together and lock them in a Brussels committee room for a few hours. By dint of a threat of repetition, the survivors would never trouble us again.

Failing that, the man missing at the feast was Tim Collins. Had he been there, he would no doubt have sided with the critics, agreeing that military intervention on the ground, rather than deployment of permanent capability committees in les couloirs of Brussels, depends absolutely on national consent. Only a nation can employ soldiers who are prepared to die for their countries, in units which have their confidence.

Try to go to war without that consent and you get a million people on the streets chanting "not in my name". And while a democratically elected government can (and did) weather such a storm, once the body bags start coming in, a prolonged military adventure becomes politically unsustainable. Such wars are more often lost on the the home front, negating the exploits on the field of battle.

In this context, we have Coelmont talking glibly of "ownership" of defence policy, but while the EU has ambitions of creating its own policy, it cannot own any casualties that would arise from it. Repatriation means what it says – the bodies go back home, and those at home do the grieving. It will always be national flags that drape the coffins.

Taking the Tim Collins thesis as a starting point, however, you will not even get soldiers prepared to die for the EU flag. Nobody will "die for Europe", and the all important effect of unit cohesion and identity bolstering the courage of individuals cannot happen at a European level.

To take account of national sensibilities, therefore, EU-flagged operations can only be deployed on low-threat operations. EU-led or flagged operations in a high-threat environment are simply not a realistic option. Casualties are the enemy of consensus – the operation would last only as long as it took the news media to transmit pictures of body bags around the world.

And therein lies a fundamental point. Collins, rightly, would have it that unit loyalties are an important determinant of performance. Capabilities are of little value if the soldiers using them are, or are forced to be, risk adverse. Well-equipped soldiers without the will to fight are simply more expensive targets.

The idea that capabilities can be developed in isolation from intended deployment is utterly flawed. Action in high-threat theatres requires the ongoing democratic consent of individual national populations, and no consent – any more than burial ceremonies – can be delegated.

Thus, no matter how well the capability question is settled (and so far it has not been), EU capabilities can never be fully deployable, which makes having them a waste of time and effort. There will always have to be duplication, because the EU can never take on the full range of tasks.

When it comes to high-threat environments, peoples of different nations will tolerate co-operation between countries, working in a common cause. But providing elements of an integrated force, fighting under an alien flag is quite another thing. We should concentrate on the former and not waste resources on the latter.

Therein is the real answer as to why the Van Orden premise must prevail. Playing soldiers is not the business of the European Union, because once you deploy soldiers, with real guns against real enemies, you are not playing games. And if you can't own the body bags, you should not be sending in troops that may come out in them.