On Friday 20 November, the European Defence Ministers supported the 2020 Strategic Review of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO).
This review assesses the progress of PESCO and provides guidance for the next phase (2021-2025).
According to the participating Member States, while the more binding mutual commitments have been a strong guideline to ensure consistent implementation of PESCO and should therefore not be changed, progress in meeting these commitments has not been sufficient and more efforts are needed.
In order to make progress in implementing PESCO, states should respect collective benchmarks for defence spending, allocate the necessary resources and make best use of EU defence tools and initiatives in their national planning processes to enhance their coherence, the strategic review explains. Better use should also be made of PESCO projects to strengthen Member States’ operational capabilities and to further develop capabilities in line with EU priorities, according to the document.
The review also calls for improving the availability, readiness and interoperability of deployable formations and enhancing the Union’s operational effectiveness, in particular by providing the necessary contributions to military missions and operations.
Finally, it is necessary to ensure that all capability building projects make the European defence industry more competitive.
The EU Council’s recommendation on sequencing and specifying more precise objectives will be revised in early 2021, with a view to setting the objectives and concrete results of the next phase of PESCO (2021-2025).
Putting incentives in place
In order to improve monitoring and compliance with the most binding commitments, the review recommends that regular discussions should be held at the political level on the state of play of the implementation of PESCO (at the level of Political and Security Committee Ambassadors or Permanent Representatives) and that issues relating to detection and force generation should be raised more systematically at the political level.
Believing that transparency among States on their respective compliance with commitments should be further improved, it also proposes the setting of measurable indicative targets. In addition, the review advises further exploring the links between the relevant EU financial instruments on operational commitments and implementation of PESCO projects in the operational area and ways to improve the financing of military missions and operations under the European Peace Facility. Existing financial incentives (such as VAT exemption for ad hoc projects of the European Defence Agency) to support defence cooperation should also be explored.
Finally, the review calls for the promotion of open cross-border supply chains.
Moving forward with projects
The document also looks at PESCO projects (see EUROPE 12580/14). It recommends that emphasis be placed on capacity development that would fill gaps in the short term. There is also a need to improve governance and project management.
“The ministers supported my call to focus more on operational projects, the joint deployment of forces on the ground” news welcomed by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
According to the strategic review, 26 projects will deliver concrete results or reach full operational capacity by the end of 2025.
On the other hand, from 2021 onwards, projects that do not achieve the expected results will have to be integrated into other projects or abandoned, the German Ministry of Defence states in a press release.
A new call for proposals for new projects will be launched at the beginning of March 2021, for an EU Council decision in November 2021.
See the conclusions: https://bit.ly/2IZAZoH (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)