MUNICH — European leaders should start to create a European army in response to Russia’s military build-up, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday.
“I really believe that the time has come that the armed forces of Europe must be created,” Zelenskyy said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. “Let’s be honest, now we can’t rule out that America might say no to Europe on issues that might threaten it.”
As the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion nears on Feb. 24, Zelenskyy said Europe needed to coalesce behind a single foreign and defense policy that would show America that the bloc is serious about its own security.
Despite steep losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin is adding 150,000 troops to his armed forces, larger than most European armies, Zelenskyy said, and is opening army recruitment offices each week. “Oil prices are still high enough for him to ignore the world,” he said.
At very least, EU countries should start merging their armed forces in regional groups as a stepping stone, like Germany and the Netherlands are doing.
The combined budget of the EU militaries dwarves anything but the US defense budget, but lots of it gets lost because of economy of scale.
The bells of war are ringing. It’s like the 30s (or perhaps even the 1910s would be more appropriate considering we are in the first part of the information age); it’s the time to be prepared for the worst case scenario.
You’re right. It’s more like the 1910s in Europe. The US loves nothing more than being first, so we’ll wait for you here in the 1930s.
More than anything, I hope the leaders of NATO work out a way to grease Ukraine’s admittance against the inevitable protest from the tangerine tyrant. It’s the only real solution. Ukraine has held up their end of the Budapest Memorandum for the last thirty years. It’s absurd that NATO even allowed Putin to repeatedly pull them out of eligibility for that long. Exceptions must be made.
Before even that they should start to pool and align their defense industries. But if you look how that is going, then imo it becomes apparent how divided the EU still is. Germany and France keep arguing who gets to do what in their joint projects, Poland buys Korean and US equipment for a lot of their stuff, and different counties are part of different projects for the next gen planes.
But anyways even if that happens, as long as we have unanimous decision making processes, a combined army would be to slow to react due to politics. As we’ve e.g. seen with sanctions
The Nordics is in this process atm. Finland Sweden and Norway at least.
The EU already has the Military Planning and Conduct Capability MPCC, which is set up to run EU battlegroups of 2500men. That would be a good place to strengthen cooperation. Currently a lot of it is within NATO, which might also be available, if the US leaves.
There also are a number of units with soldiers from multiple countries like the Franco-German Brigade.
But there’s still lots of waste due to redundancies. I already read some estimates that put European waste on procurement, logistics, and overhead above the entire Russian defense budget.
There are solutions for that too. EU wide procurement agency is the biggest one. With some standards permanent staff and so forth. It is already pretty common to have multi national weapons development, like Eurofighter, Eurocopter and FREMM. Also some good weapons are already bought by a lot of countries and then modified like Leopard2, OTO Melara 76mm naval gun and so forth. So many projects have already quite some scale. Regional groups would not help much with that.
For stuff like logistics there is for example the Binational Air Transport Squadron Rhin/Rhein.