The Court of Auditors warned, in an analytical document published on Thursday 12 September, against an imbalance between the EU's defence ambitions and reality.
“If factors crucial to success and clear objectives are lacking, current EU defence initiatives are likely to remain stagnant and achieve no results”, warned Juhan Parts, the Court of Auditors' member responsible for the analysis document, in a statement.
According to the auditors, the impact of new EU initiatives and the rapid increase in spending that accompanies them is conditional on the existence of an effective planning process at EU level, the involvement of Member States, the impact on actual capacity needs and the governance and accountability framework. Factors that are not yet present today, denounce the auditors.
Moreover, according to them, there is a risk that appropriate control systems may not be in place to support an increase in the budget for defence and external security from 2.8 billion euros for 2014-2020 to 22.5 billion euros for 2021-2027.
The Court of Auditors also points out that defence is an area intrinsically linked to national sovereignty, with clear strategic differences between Member States, which do not necessarily have the same perception of security threats, nor a common vision of the Union's role in defence matters and which have different national rules of engagement. In such a context, some concepts such as “strategic autonomy” or “European army” remain broad and vague.
There is also an “obvious” gap between what Member States are supposed to do in terms of defence capabilities and what they can actually decide and achieve. Under-investment and cuts in national budgets in recent years have weakened the EU's military capabilities, with many redundancies and significant fragmentation. The lack of common technical standards, which hinders the interoperability of the various armed forces in Europe, further increases this toll, the auditors add.
“Overall, the current military capabilities of Member States do not match the EU's level of military ambition and several hundred billion euros would be needed to fill Europe's capability gap, if it were to defend itself without external assistance”, they warn, adding that the situation would worsen with Brexit.
Finally, the Court of Auditors stresses the need to ensure the coherence of EU initiatives and synergies with other defence and security frameworks, in particular NATO. Thus, the EU's ability to operate complementarily with the Alliance, and thus avoid redundancy and duplication of functions, is a critical point, according to the auditors.
See the analysis document: http://bit.ly/2meNRfx (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)