Europe’s new defense chief: ‘A king without a kingdom’?

Berlin: Facing an aggressive Russia, a long war in Ukraine and an uncertain American commitment to Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, as president of the European Commission, has created a new post of defense commissioner.

The task before any new commissioner is formidable. The war in Ukraine has pointed up huge shortcomings in Europe’s capacity to defend itself. Its armies are small and sometimes poorly equipped. It has been slow to increase military spending and prioritize the production of artillery shells, ammunition and air defense. It remains deeply dependent on the United States for key military equipment and funds.

But even before the commissioner, a former prime minister of Lithuania, Andrius Kubilius, can begin, analysts and others have raised alarms that the portfolio is ill-defined and vastly underfunded. The appointment, they say, appears more of a semaphore than a substantive position, calling into question whether Europe is fundamentally serious about taking responsibility for its own defense.

Europe has no army. Defense is legally in the competence of the 27 member states, 23 of which are also members of the NATO alliance. In reality, Kubilius will be a commissioner for the European arms industry, not defense itself.

His difficult job will be trying to push the arms industries of various European nations toward more standardized production and cooperative purchasing power and coordination.

Before he resigned suddenly Monday, Thierry Breton, who was responsible for industry as commissioner for internal markets and security, estimated that 100 billion euros a year (about $111 billion) would be needed for European defense.

But even 20 billion euros or 30 billion euros, the size of the military budgets of larger European countries, “could make the European Union a sizable investor on the continent and start shaping business decisions,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general for defense investment now at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

For now, the EU is not even close. It can spend just 1.5 billion euros for 2025 to 2027 under its budgeted strategy, far less than required, said Christian Mölling, a defense expert and director for Europe for the Bertelsmann Foundation.

“So to change the EU structure you’re really looking more for a wizard than a commissioner,” Mölling said. “It’s a king without a kingdom.”

A senior European diplomat also expressed skepticism, saying that the commission had no extra money for the job, so Kubilius wouldn’t be able to get much done. In any case, the diplomat said, individual countries would do better at coordinating military capabilities than Brussels could.

A defense commissioner “could prove the catalyst for further reform and better coordination, but good intentions in this area have all too often failed to deliver the desired outcomes,” argued Ester Sabatino of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a centrist research institute that focuses on defense and security.

Then there is the question of overlapping responsibilities within the commission, the EU’s 27-member executive arm. Von der Leyen will have to “carve out something from already existing portfolios, so how is that going to work?” asked Grand.

The EU already has a vice president in charge of European foreign affairs and security policy, soon to be Kaja Kallas of Estonia.

Von der Leyen, who is starting her second term, has named a former French foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, to succeed Breton and he will keep much the same responsibilities for industrial strategy, but with a higher rank, as a vice president. There is also another vice president, Henna Virkkunen of Finland, responsible for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

So what is job of defense commissioner and is it really needed? asked Mölling.

In a recent comprehensive report on how to revive European growth and competitiveness, Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and governor of the European Central Bank, supported the new commissioner’s job.

Europe buys more than 60 per cent of its equipment from the United States, plus another 15 per cent from other non-EU countries. So making European weapons more competitive would be good for European companies and taxpayers, Draghi argued, echoing many others.

“Europe is wasting its common resources,” he wrote. “We have large collective spending power, but we dilute it across multiple different national and EU instruments.” He added: “We are still not joining forces in the defense industry to help our countries to integrate and reach scale.”

He proposed creating EU bonds for military-related projects and other key investments. But that idea was quickly shot down by key member states, like Germany and the Netherlands, that have rejected collective European debt except for dealing with the “one-time” crisis of the coronavirus.

But without added money behind the EU ambition, the new commissioner is unlikely to be able to achieve what is needed. That includes helping the bloc make its support for Ukraine more timely, efficient and coordinated, while also replenishing the stocks of military equipment and ammunition depleted in European countries that have sent them to Ukraine.

Europe also needs to provide seed money, Grand emphasized. That is the only way to advance research and development of next-generation weapons and so-called strategic enablers, like integrated air and missile defense, sophisticated drones and intelligence satellites, among other things, that are now almost exclusively provided and sold by the United States.

Making the EU a player in procurement could slim down extensive overlap. To satisfy competing domestic industries, Europe produces 12 battle tanks and 17 infantry fighting vehicles, and it provided Ukraine 10 kinds of howitzers, not all of which use the same shells.

To improve consolidation and make spending efficient, European rules on competition would have to be softened for defense, Grand said.

Still, he said, “I’m not sure having a single product line is a good idea,” and Brussels should not get into the business of trying to define military requirements for each country. “NATO knows much better, and the commission should not try to do that.”

Given the war in Ukraine and a US concentration on the threat of a rising China, the question of European military dependency on Washington is no longer just a theoretical question, said Ian Lesser, director of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund.

It’s a natural inclination for Europeans to buy off-the-shelf from larger American arms producers, he said. “But Europe is in the process of shifting from seeing its own defense companies as national champions to thinking of them also as essential building blocks for stronger European defense,” Lesser said.

He, too, emphasised the issue of money, with major European economies like Germany, France and Italy already scouring their budgets for cuts.

As some EU countries are becoming skeptical of further large support for Ukraine, the motivation to come up with the money may only wane, said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank centered on security.

He said he was skeptical that the defense commissioner would have the scope to make an impact on Europe’s military strategy. As ever, he said, a lot will depend on political will, and not just the funding.

“There’s a disconnect between the stated ambition you get initially and the hard reality of when you actually have to get member states’ approval,” he said.