By Sir John Redwood
[This article was first published in Sir John Redwood’s Diary and we re-publish with his kind permission.]
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The main continental EU countries are out to strengthen their military collaboration. Over the years they have worked away at joint exercises, common weapons procurement, common standards, exchange of personnel, unified commands and shared missions.
There are now military interventions undertaken by EU directed troops or naval vessels. The UK has been particularly concerned about being pulled into a European army, owing to the legal constraints that operate on a member state once it has accepted the competence of the EU in any given area.
Some think the UK has already consented to more collaboration than is desirable and is now entrapped. Others accept that as we leave the EU we cannot be forced to co-operate or to participate against our will.
The UK has been keener on joint working through NATO, including our US allies. NATO too has a long tradition of common action, shared defence procurement programmes, common standards and procedures, exchanges of personnel and unified commands for given tasks, exercises and missions.
It is clear under the NATO charter that whilst we and the other members sign a mutual pledge to defend each other, a NATO member is free to determine their own commitment to any resulting NATO action. NATO is a coalition of the willing, that makes up missions from members in the light of the needs based on consent.
Under President Trump the USA would like the continental countries to make a bigger contribution to NATO defence. The USA points out that European members of NATO rely on US engagement and the common security guarantee for their ultimate protection. Surely, the US asks, the Europeans could at least meet the minimum funding requirement for NATO membership so they are making a bit better contribution to the collective defence?
The UK does meet the minimum requirement, and does possess military capability to join NATO engagements around the world, contributing naval vessels, aircraft and mobile soldiers. UK forces have worked hard to ensure they can co-operate with US forces, as well as undertaking training and exercises with European forces.
Setting our armed services in the context of collaboration and assistance with others does bring a downside. It might mean that we lack particular capabilities where we rely on others, which would limit our own ability to undertake a mission for ourselves.
The UK needs to ensure it has sufficient capability to go to the assistance of our own territories or allies, and to defend ourselves at home, whoever the aggressor and whatever our principal allies might think.
More sensible comment on this subject in Sir John’s diary today:
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2019/07/18/a-countrys-defence-depends-on-industry-as-well-as-its-armed-services/
Oh what a tangled web we (our quisling masters) weave! The EU is notorious for long convoluted treaties that obfuscate what is going on – who in their right mind would want to plough through all that verbiage?
Fortunately UK Column
https://www.ukcolumn.org/
has done the job for us, and we may thank the Good Lord for that. Go to their web-site and read (a) the whole time-line and (b) our new EU leader Ursula von der Leyen setting out her view on where the EU is going.
In summary, the “EU army” is dead – what we have are any number of bilateral defence treaties which commit our forces and our defence industries to operate under central EU control fed by an EU budget, which will no doubt be funded by EU taxation masquerading as national taxation in the EU Defence Union member countries (which will include us after “Brexit” unless Boris withdraws from existing commitments made since the Brexit vote). So, the same thing pretending to be something else.
NATO (in the form of Jens Stoltenberg) and the EU are at one with this, there isn’t space for a cigarette paper between them because the USA wants the EU to contribute it’s share of funding to NATO and is happy to see this at the cost of accepting EU single-point command and control (of operations and funding and defence procurement and standards harmonisation). So the deal is that NATO becomes an alliance of the EU with the USA and Europe via the EU finally coughs up for their own defence.
Watch Nigel speak the truth unto power in his latest speech in the EU parliament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75l0hhuw-4
He hasn’t had much to say about EU defence union up until now but perhaps he has been biding his time – let us all hope so and do what we can to get the message out to the British public.
I foresee problems with the EU and NATO
NATO has worked for the last 70 odd years as the effective and collaborative deterrent and occasional enforcement arm of the free world. With the questionable exception of Turkey, which is less ‘democratic’ than its other members, NATO’s individual governments, by consensus, allow joint commands or commands under the aegis of generals from other powers and normally from the US ( like Schwartzkopf / Clark et al ) The USA has strict protocols limiting the power of generals with POTUS as CIC.
The EU on the other hand wants to sweep all that aside and have a single-federal army under the command of the unelected EU President.
A very dangerous thing. Russia WILL NOT TOLERATE a federal EU Army under German command right on its borders. The USA will not subsidise it or accept the lines of command through Brussels and we, the newly independent UK, must stick with our US allies or we can’t operate an independent nuclear deterrent nor probably assemble a carrier strike group.
The uncertainty of this situation ( defence strategy is largely influenced by uncertainty ) means we should ( as Hunt says ) start rebuilding and recruiting for the Royal Navy, as our maritime assets can only now be guaranteed by the UK /US alliance (as well as old- Commonwealth allies such as Aus/Can.
Even if we immediately start building – with accelerated effort- already -designed ships ( like the Daring class) we will still have to wait about 4 years before those assets would be readty and the manpower recruited and trained.
There is no time to waste .
In reading this something struck me. As a NATO member how is it that when our territory was invaded (The Falklands) we were left to defend ourselves? I’m not questioning our membership of NATO, obviously this is a good thing, however I am puzzled about this.
And France sold Exocet missiles to Argentina…
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, the UK government chose not to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which would have obliged NATO memberst treat the attack as an attack on all members. No reasons have been given for this, but it can be reasonably assumed that geography played a role in this decision, as NATO was very much more concerned with member territorial defence in the North Atlantic and its riparian states, and had never operated “out of area” at this time.
It might have also invoked a less than wholehearted response, as the USA and post-colonial countries in Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium) would have been less likely to extend NATO’s remit to the outposts of empire of the British or the French, which by and large they see as undesirable imperial hangovers rather than integral territory of member states, unless, like Diego Garcia, there is something in it for them. The USA in particular has a history of considering post-imperial outposts in the Americas as an unwarranted interference into what it considers its own backyard.
Having tried to play honest broker, the USA did decide to throw its support behind the UK, supplying us with air-to-air missiles, much to the dismay of the Argentine junta. The French too showed some degree of support, declining to ship additional Exocet missile to Argentina, although its technicians did remain in Argentina to fulfil their contractual obligation to make the missiles already there operational.