Different Times require New Thinking

The Russian aggression towards Ukraine has sharply revealed a landscape of European defence that is radically different from the Cold War.

Largely due to a blind pursuit of the so called ‘peace dividend’ by European nations, NATO has been recast from an alliance of roughly equals that held the line against the Soviet Union to be a group dominated by the USA with a group of European nations that lack military capability as individual nations and collectively.

There is an urgent need to build European military capability within the NATO framework. This will require different thinking to that which has brought us to this perilous position. National requirements and vested interest has led to a fragmentation of capability that when collected is probably less than the sum of its parts. It has also led to an industrial capability that has been sized to meet reduced and intermittent demand signals, and lacks resilience.

To build a NATO pillar of European nations we should consider different thinking. In the first place European nations, including U.K. should admit the myth that they are capable of national defence in any form other than as a member of an alliance. This would lead to a framework of true burden sharing. Secondly they should follow a roadmap to equipment commonality rather than the sham of interoperability. This would create a European military capability within NATO and lead to a resilient industrial capability on a continental scale that would be an equivalent to the USA.

There is an urgent need for a European military capability. We need to think about in a different way. To paraphrase Einstein to address today’s challenges we need to adopt different thinking to that which created them.