EUROPEAN COOPERATION ADDING VALUE
Claude-France Arnould Chief executive European Defence Agency
EDA’s key mission is delivering capabilities This is a critical time for the European Defence Agency. Defence departments of European Union member states are facing a perfect storm: declining government revenues, an increasingly unstable world, a shift in US focus and a domestic industry struggling to retain its technical know-how as major programmes are cut or delayed
W
hile the political will to cooperate among Member States has never been stronger translating this will into direct positive action is complex, yet this is the key function of the European Defence Agency (EDA). If Europe’s governments are to protect their citizens from future threats they will have to rely on the agency to help develop wider and deeper collaborative initiatives - the only way sovereign states will be able to deploy enhanced capabilities while controlling their defence and security budgets. This is the considerable challenge facing the agency’s chief executive Claude-France Arnould. She took the time to speak with European Defence Matters.
But this also a time of opportunity – as Americans like to say "never waste a crisis”. We should not miss this difficult moment to work more efficiently together. I’m concerned but optimistic; I think cooperation is the way forward in defence, and I think more and more people are recognizing that. You only have to look at the results of our Steering Board meetings, where defence ministers have repeatedly asked us to take on new areas of responsibility, such as training and air-to-air refuelling.
“We have to take the tough decisions now, or face dire consequences in the coming decades"
What is the current state of the EU’s defence capabilities? We are at a crucial moment where we risk degrading our strategic, industrial and technical abilities. Our operations in Libya revealed again that even though Europe spends quite a lot of money on defence, there are crucial capabilities missing, and this risks being degraded even further as governments look for savings.
E U R O P E A N D E F E N C E M AT T E R S
Issue 1 2012
So what has the EDA done so far on cooperation? What are the Agency’s major accomplishments? We’ve made some great progress. We’ve had very real successes in the field of training helicopter crews – we’ve trained 152 crews to date, and half of those have been deployed on operations; none of the Member States would be able to afford alone helicopter exercises on the scale that we’ve been able to organize. In countering IEDs we have developed capabilities like the forensic laboratory that can make immediate differences in Afghanistan. In fact, the laboratory is a good example of how the EDA can work: IEDs were identified as a threat, 9