Eurodefense Nederland nieuws

The Strategic Compass for the EU’s security and defence policy, to be adopted in 2022, must generate immediate action. The best way of ensuring that is to prepare new capability initiatives and, potentially, new operational engagements now, so that they can be launched simultaneously with the Strategic Compass. In that light, “the development of an initial-entry force as a pool of Member State forces that train and exercise together and are made available to the EU” (as summarised in an EEAS working paper), is one of the most promising ideas on the table. How to make it work? Photo Credits: New Zealand Defence Force from Wellington, New Zealand, Wikimedia Commons

Public support for EU defence has been dismissed as mere “permissive consensus”, rather than genuine support. The assumption that public opinion towards European integration is passive and shallow, especially over foreign policy issues, is contested in a paper by. K. Schildea, S. Andersonb, and A. Garner . They demonstrate that, contrary to the logic permissive concensus, the European publics have held coherent preferences over the use of force at the European level. They conclude that the slow progress of integration in this area is due to the reluctance of elites rather than to the reticence of Europe’s citizens. Photo credits: Aad Meijer, Flickr

The French military currently is one of Western Europe’s most capable, and it boasts a range of capabilities that enable it to engage in the full spectrum of operations, including high-intensity conventional warfare against a peer adversary. In this report , RAND researchers examine the role that the French military might play as a coalition partner in a hypothetical high intensity conventional conflict in Europe. Researchers drew on a wide range of publications in French and English, as well as on conversations with French defense experts to understand not just the French military’s capabilities and capacity to wage war in general but also its ability to wage high-intensity conventional warfare in particular. Photo credits: Contando Estrelas, Flickr.