According to information from the German Press Agency, the concept envisages further developing the existing EU battle groups into powerful crisis reaction forces that can be deployed at short notice. To this end, space and cyber capabilities as well as special forces and strategic air transport capacities are to be provided.
“The recent events in Afghanistan have shown once again that the EU must be able to (…) act robustly and swiftly,” says the paper written by Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland and Slovenia the dpa is available. For this it is necessary to improve the availability, readiness, operational capability and competence of the armed forces and to make better use of military cooperation formats among the EU member states.
Specifically, the five countries are also proposing that Article 44 of the EU Treaty, which has never been used before, be used by “coalitions of willing”. Overall, this would allow more flexibility and a modular approach to crisis management in the EU and could increase the EU’s ability to act, according to the concept paper. In addition, existing regional collaborations should be better used.
The concept paper does not provide any specific information on the overall strength of the reaction force. Only the land force unit intended for this is said to be able to reach the size of a brigade – that could be around 5,000 soldiers.
The previous EU battlegroup concept provides that two units with around 1500 soldiers each are kept ready, which are made available every six months alternately by different EU countries. Recently, however, there had been repeated problems in gathering enough troops. For example, there is currently only one battlegroup. The EU forces have never been deployed.
Discussions about setting up a new reaction force have been going on in the EU for a long time. They were last fueled again by the military dependence on the USA during the evacuation mission in Afghanistan. In any case, the new force should be so strong that it could theoretically take on a military operation like that of the Americans to secure the airport in Kabul.
After the Taliban came to power in mid-August, the United States made evacuation flights possible with around 6,000 US soldiers. Because of their departure, however, the Europeans then had to stop their rescue flights for people in need of protection earlier than actually desired.
Ideally, the concept paper should now find its way into the so-called strategic compass. It is to be used by the spring of next year to determine what the EU should be able to do in a crisis – but also what not. The title of the paper is clear in this regard. It reads: “More willingness, more flexibility, more cooperation – together on a new level of crisis management in the EU”.