Posted on 01/24/2005 8:54:19 AM PST by jb6
The new arms chief of the European Union has issued a blunt warning that the days of governments favouring domestic companies when buying tanks or other major military hardware are over.
Nick Witney, the chief executive of the European Defence Agency, the EU's fledgling arms procurement group, said there must be more "collective" decision-making over what goes into Europe's armouries now that military units under EU command are a reality on the ground.
"There is a broad consensus that we can't have all procurement programs formulated on a solely national basis anymore," Mr Witney told Euractiv, a pan-European internet news service.
Mr Witney hailed the long-mocked dream of a Euro-military as now "real and tangible". He pointed to Bosnia, where 6,000 European troops, under blue and gold EU colours, took over peacekeeping duties from Nato last month.
Mr Witney, a former senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, said it was his mission to halt what he called "business as usual", in which defence ministries draw up weapons plans then hand contracts to favoured local firms.
He said he was talking to defence ministries about a code of conduct in which, in certain areas of defence spending, "competition would generally be the norm even if not required by the treaty".
Exceptions should be allowed, and national governments respected, said Mr Witney.
But he added: "If an exception on project X or Y was made by a government, they should offer an explanation to a central monitoring point to provide transparency to see who follows and who is not following the code."
Such talk will send shivers down spines in Paris, Rome and other capitals where, for all the lip-service paid to European unity money is still channelled, time and again, towards cherished "national champions".
The United States has long nagged European nations to increase defence spending and stop assuming that US forces will protect them from any major threat.
Washington spends more than twice as much on defence as the EU. Mr Witney said strained budgets had already sounded a death knell for "national champions".
You know, to most people this is just called "free trade" and "open markets". It's really funny you always have to see something dark and sinister (and flog that "Fourth Reich" dead horse, of course).
That reminds me, you didn't say anything about Russian selling weapons to China and Syria, and blasting the US Administration because it said Syria was linked to terrorism. Maybe you don't place the 4th Reich easternly enough.
Haha... this is too funny... the result will be crappy military equipment designed by bureaucrats, and built by the lowest bidder.
In the end, it will be a wealth transfer scheme for the more developed EU nations to siphon off the military spending of other less fortunate members.
Final result will be fewer firms, less innovation, and more expensive equipment.
I don't approve of Russian sales, period. Unfortunetly for them, Syria has been a long time client, but the EU is muscling in on all the markets, especially the arab/chinese ones, while condemning others for human rights abuse but ignoring China's. As for China, the Russians sell them mostly navel equipment while arming India, Vietnam, Khazakstan, S.Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia with anything they want, surroundng the Chinese.
This will also cost us money, by forcing the new members not to buy US equipment.
We'll see... we'll see... In the long run I think it will result in a boom for our arms industry. At some point countries will become frustrated and they'll be buying American equipment in spite of what the EU says.
Thing is the EU has no way to police its members.
Er, the EU is not muscling in the Chinese market, which is still under an embargo, and Russia's main competitor to equip the Arab states are the USA and not the EU (with F-16 fighters, M-1 tanks - did you know that Egypt fielded 800 of them, BTW ? I found that statistic rather surpirsing !). That's one of the reasons why the EU weapons manufacturers are pressuring the EU governments about lifting the ban on Chinese arms sales, as a matter of fact.
Yes, the EU turns a blind eye to human rights violations in CHina - let's be frank, so does everyone else. IIRC, China still benefits from the "most privileged nation" clause granted by the US federal government. As for Russian sales, the question is never raised by the Russian goverment AFAIK.
Fact is, Mother Russia needs the cash, and sells weapons to more or less whoever is ready to pay - which is, as I understand it, the common practice of weapons manufacturers worldwide+, so I don't particularly blame Russia here. Like their Russian counterparts, EU arms manufacturers also sell weapons system to China's rival, India (from fighters to submarines IIRC).
You need to read their constitution. The boasting from Brussels is that the "parliment" will have more financial control of their "states" then the US federal government has of our real states.
Oh, for that matter, I think it is short sighted to sell China anything, but then that's just alarmist ole me. History of course backs up my point, but we'll ignore that.
They will probably get their way too. The only thing keeping the EU from having the sort of defense establishment we have is money and political will. They are not dumber than we are, they are perfectly capable of producing a world class military industrial complex.
This is nothing to laugh at. Wait until France wants "European" strategic subs on the level that we have them. It will not be very funny.
It will also reduce our sales (and increase our research costs) and decrease or leverage in the EU. France is behind all of this, of course. This is nothing to laugh at.
There's a flaw in the constitution...
One of the primary articles ensures a member state's right to see to its own national security.
If policies of the union endanger a member state's security, that state has the right to provide for its own security.
In order for the EU to exercise the kind of control it wants, it will have to start acting like the Soviet Union.
Yes, especially since Russia and China had two very nasty military encroachments in 1966 along the Ienissei river, IIRC. I always wonder whether China will raise territorial issues with Russia.
Knowing France and Germany, their self-interest will overrule the good of the union, and they'll trash the arms industry in Europe. They'll end up decades behind our own development levels while they try to build it up.
Yes, if they do things correctly they could end up competing more on par with us, but what we're seeing is a classic centralization without benefit. Properly implemented the EU should've only reformed the bidding process by opening it up. Instead they've done it backward by consolidating the procurement process.
If they went the path of opening up the bidding process, but allowed market forces and governments to deal with their own procurement, I'd say that the chances of their catching up would be conceivable. But since they're consolidating procurement I only see the possibility of rampant corruption holding them back.
You are kidding yourself if you think that we have some huge lead over the EU and far as arms development goes. We just spend more money and spent a little more wisely (but only a little more.)
The EU may perhaps become the most serious military threat we may ever face - both directly and indirectly.
With all due respect, I think that you are being naive here.
There is a tendency on FR to discount the EU because of their socialist economies. They (and Russia) were threats before and they had even more ridgid ones then than now. Much of our military R & D ramp up was in a government climate that had much more regulation - and much more cocialist - than we do now. Socialism in the EU does not preclude a military threat.
EU planner are not fools, they understand their parameters at least as well as we do. Makes you wonder what they have up their sleeves.
And North Korea... http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/4/27/193941.shtml
Actually, I'm not saying we have a big lead now. I'm saying that by the time they recover from the rampant corruption that they're going to end up with, by then we'll have a big lead in the application of technologies to military systems.
They are not centralizing their military, only the procurement procedures. This is a blatant attempt to seize the military spending of the poorer members of the union. If they run the procurement process as successfully as they did with the Oil for Food program, it is going to be inefficient and not oriented toward the mission.
I'm not being naive, so much as pessimistic that they'll be able to pull of what we did, because they don't perceive a threat, and therefore there is no enemy lighting a fire under their butts to make sure they get things done.
This article doesn't say that. What it says is that the EU arms procurement department will usurp the procurement procedures of the individual members when they are buying for their own militaries.
It may be that they finally ditch their huge social transfer system down the road by declaring (and manufacturing) some sort of EU-wide "security crisis" and many of those folks on the dole end up in uniform.
The EUocrats want power and little else. They only care about their "social model" to the extent that it gives them power. They are not really communists; they are fascists.
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