La défense européenne à l’heure de la guerre en Ukraine
In his latest book, Nicolas Gros-Verheyde, editor-in-chief of the online media outlet Bruxelles 2 (B2) and specialist in defence issues, comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the reactions of the EU and its member states and its consequences for European politics.
After prefaces by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU High Representative, Josep Borrell, the author delivers a description in chronological order, in the manner of a timeline and featuring information gathered from European decision-makers, of the days leading up to and immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “an impossibly dangerous week, during which the Europeans saw all their prejudices, barriers and taboos fall away” (our translation throughout).
The book details the responses from the EU, for instance by summarising the many summits held to discuss Ukraine and with a report for each of them on the decisions made by the European leaders. “Despite enormous political differences at the outset on relations with Russia and Ukraine respectively, the Twenty-Seven managed to retain their unity and determination”, the author stresses, albeit observing that the former continues to present a challenge.
Gros-Verheyde goes on to take stock of the defence investments – one of the things that are no longer A taboo – and of the European countries’ provision of military support to Ukraine. The strategic transformation of the continent, symbolised in the view of the author by the end of the Danish opt-out on CSDP, Sweden and Finland joining NATO, and the EU’s enlargement policy are also explained, as is the European Political Community.
Nor does the author, a specialist in NATO affairs, omit to mention the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for the Alliance, which is getting its second wind. “Never has the cooperation between the Europeans and the NATO members been as intense and never has the unity of perspective been so broad. Never has the Atlantic Alliance had such ambiguous role in the defence of the European territory, from Brest to Tallinn (…). And yet the Atlantic Alliance has somewhat missed a trick with Ukraine in a way the Europeans have not” Gros-Verheyde summarises.
The book then goes into depth on the evolving landscape of European instruments to provide Ukraine with military assistance: ‘European Peace Facility’, training, weaponry, joint acquisitions, security commitments. But it also looks at the consequences of this for the EU’s other CSDP missions and the sanctions it has taken. “The EU has gone in to bat for Ukraine’s security (…). Packages of sanctions being handed down, one after the other. It is not always easy. Everything has to be negotiated step by step. The initial enthusiasm has given way to more concern for interests”, stresses the author, going on to detail package after package – the Europeans have just finished negotiating their fourteenth – of measures adopted against Russia and Belarus, with explanations of the occasionally tricky negotiation processes between the member states.
The final section of his book, Gros-Verheyde expands his research to detail the non-military support Ukraine has received: financial assistance, civil aid, corridors of solidarity and transport networks.
He also takes a deep dive into Europe’s position on other global challenges, as “Russia is unstinting in its efforts to make life hard for the Europeans, most notably in Africa”.
Finally, the book examines the lessons to be learnt from the Ukrainian crisis: the need to avoid hiding one’s head in the sand, to change the modus operandi, the “general mindset, but also to act consequently” or the need for the knowledge to detect and assess new Russian threats. He goes on to conclude that the Russian invasion of Ukraine already constitutes a strategic defeat for Moscow. (Camille-Cerise Gessant)
Nicolas Gros-Verheyde. La défense européenne à l’heure de la guerre en Ukraine – Des tabous tombent (available in French only). Éditions du Villard. ISBN: 978-2-9560-0133-1. 256 pages. €25,00
Le besoin d’une réelle politique industrielle de défense
In this article, which appeared in the latest edition of the publication of the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS) focusing on defence industry issues, Renaud Bellais, co-director of the Defence Observatory of the Fondation Jean Jaurès, rounds up the specifics of a war economy, which is difficult to recognise from the highly rhetorical speech by French President Emanuel Macron. This naturally leads the author to highlight the urgent need for a defence industrial policy, which has long been unthinkable in France and the rest of the European continent more broadly. The European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) and its partner EDIP programme proposed by the European Commission are currently the only specific initiatives in this field.
“Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reactions in France and many other European countries have shown that political and public decision-makers were taken by surprise over the lead time needed significantly to scale up the production of military materials and weaponry in Europe and the United States. The move to a ‘war economy” called for by President Macron in June 2022 at Eurosatory is proving tougher than initially anticipated. After three decades of peace dividends, it appears that public decision-makers are coming up against industrial realities that have been largely forgotten about”, Renaud Bellais accurately observes.
What is a war economy if not “the mass mobilisation of the population, not just in armies, with a phenomenal leap in military staffing levels, but also in the section of the economy that is rechannelled into the armies’ needs”? On the basis of this definition, therefore, we are a long way from that. More significantly, there is no immediate justification for it. In order to come about, it would also be necessary for it to enjoy popular support at a reasonably high level, to allow it to draw its legitimacy from a feeling of immediate peril. Furthermore, as Bellais points out, “beyond 5% of GDP for an advanced economy, defence continues to be a marginal economic player”. One might add that beyond 3%, it remains a secondary priority in politics.
“We do not change up a gear until military efforts get close to the 10% mark, as is the case in Russia at the moment and was in the United States during the Korean War. However, the breakthrough really comes at a level of 15% and beyond: the share of the economy put to work to service the armies is high enough to move us into a different dimension, as it becomes necessary to change the economic organisation to produce the anticipated effects”, Bellais explains, adding that “this configuration remains relatively rare, particularly over a fairly prolonged period. France and the United Kingdom devoted a quarter of their GDP to military spending during the First World War, the Americans as much as 43% in 1944. If the President of the Republic is talking about a ‘war economy’ and announces the doubling of military spending between now and 2030 (in current terms, not constant), we are still a long way from the tipping points proposed in this analysis. The evolution of military spending in France has spoken for itself since 1950: in the best-case scenario, taking account of inflation, France’s military efforts are expected to stand at 2.5% of GDP in 2030”.
Budgetary logic, in use since the late 1960s and far more since 1990, and which has made defence an adjustment variable, has made a “bonsai industry (…) the counterpart of a sample-based army”, the author writes, going on to explain that “the absence of compelling needs has led to a reduction in the size of the industrial and technological defence based on criteria of cost and budget rather than reaction capability in the event of war. This strategy has been pushed to such a degree that any scaling back up is now looking complicated, not to say difficult to implement with the desired flexibility and reactivity”.
Yet “the war in Ukraine has shown that the consumption of available stocks and attrition of materials could happen much faster than anticipated in the military planning operations of recent years. Do we need to point out that every day or two, the Ukrainian artillery uses the number of shells that corresponds to the entire annual output of the French industry up to 2022? Even though production has increased fivefold between 2022 and 2024, it is still by no means adequate to maintain a high-intensity commitment such as the objective of the European Union to supply Ukraine with 1 million shells a year, i.e. twice as many”, he points out. He goes on to conclude that there is a “need for a proper long-term industrial armaments strategy, ensuring consistency and constancy of decisions in this area of sovereignty”.
The FRS also includes an article jointly authored by Josselin Droff and Julien Malizard (IHEDN) presenting the hypothesis of two complementary defence markets.
The “’demand shock’ post-February 2022 means that the industrial offer needs to change. We are in the situation of a supply side that is relatively inelastic to the strategic ruptures that are shaping demand. On a qualitative level, the conflict in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of new capabilities in the conduct of operations in a modern, high-intensity conflict, such as remotely operated weaponry, small-scale and versatile drones (deployable in the air, on land or at sea), cyber and space (particularly as regards the transmission and use of data). The emergence of a clear high attrition risk is also prompts us, from the point of view of industrial economy, to take a closer look at the consumables market, i.e. materials with an extremely short life (e.g. drones). On the other hand, the context of a demonstration of force between major military powers means that it is impossible to manage without durable goods, i.e. major equipment with a very long life (aircraft carriers, fighter jets, hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, etc.). This ambivalence is central to the current changes in defence and, more specifically, the defence industry”, the authors explain.
Droff and Malizard conclude that there are two armaments markets: “the first is made up of the traditional players of the defence industry, which are able to provide classic capability supply, such as armoured vehicles, artillery systems, aircraft and ships. The second concerns the emerging industrial actors that are providing a response to certain needs that are not covered by the classic materials, for instance in the fields of drones, cyber and space as well as IT and data treatment”.
The authors then define the characteristics of these: unit costs at a steep level of growth, considerable barriers to market entry, low competition, situations of oligopoly or even monopoly, for the traditional suppliers; relatively low fixed costs and innovation based largely on adapting dual technologies to military needs or recombining existing technologies to respond to an operational need that is not covered, products with characteristics of consumables with a short very short life (kamikaze drones, for instance), low barriers to market entry, potentially greater competition, for the emerging industry players.
“These two markets are sometimes seen as competing with each other, but we believe that they can be seen as both competing and complementary in terms of covering the capability spectrum”, the authors argue, concluding that “on the demand side, a fundamental question is correctly to identify the characteristics of a material upstream, so that we know which market we are dealing with. What are the decision-making criteria for that? For instance, General Burckard, Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces, explained that the French army had focused enormously on high technology, but that with the return of the logic of attrition, this raises the question of the sustainability of weapons used with a very high unit cost and shows that there was also a need for less expensive ‘weapons of attrition’. With this in mind, a ‘decision weapon’ is seen as a durable good (capital) and relates to the traditional market. A weapon of attrition, on the other hand, is seen as more of a ‘consumable’ and is therefore something for the emerging market. On the supply side, the fundamental question concerns the adaptation of the industrial and state actors. On the one hand, the acquisition procedures, inherited from decades of practice, need to be reviewed to build in the agility needed to satisfy the requirements expressed by the Armed Forces. Can the actors of the traditional DTIB, which are highly specialised because of the barriers to entering the traditional market, adapt to this market duality?” (OJ)
Renaud Bellais. Économie de guerre: au-delà des attentes, le besoin d’une réelle politique industrielle de défense (available in French only). Défense & industries, no 18, June 2024. 37 pages. The review of the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique can be downloaded free of charge from: https://aeur.eu/f/cs7