UK warms to France on defense

In October 2008, I was at a dinner with Liam Fox—then the opposition Conservative Party’s defense spokesman—organized by the Centre for European Reform.  A noted euroskeptic, Dr. Fox (he’s a former civilian army medic) had nothing good to say about the European Union at all in the field of defense.

France though was a different matter: He spoke favorably of bilateral, rather than multilateral, defense cooperation with Europe’s other serious sizable military power.

Now, Dr. Fox is defense minister, the coalition government has followed up on this with serious talk about cooperating with France in the face of severe military cutbacks. Today’s Brussels Beat column covered the subject, including the U.S. reaction.

The two are being thrust into each other’s arms as they try to retain as much capability as they can with fewer resources. (The U.K. enjoys good cooperation with a handful of other European militaries already—notably Denmark and the Netherlands with which it’s operated in Afghanistan—but neither of course has France’s all-round military capabilities and size.)

As the column points out, closer conversations with France predated the new government. And previous efforts at cooperation have not been all that successful. A past plan to cooperate with France on building aircraft carriers didn’t advance very far, and the French cancelled theirs anyway in 2008. An apocryphal, and untrue, story suggest planning for the common platform fell apart because the French insisted that the galleys wanted high-performance bread ovens that the cornflake-eating British didn’t need.

Public procurement of defense equipment is a nightmare with just one government in charge. Sharing equipment is also problematic. How practical is it for Britain to offer its aircraft carrier, as is being discussed, for use both for the U.S. and its Joint Strike Fighters and for France and its Rafales? Will both work with the same catapults and arresting gear? And what about below deck, with weapons systems and maintenance?

Still, Ếtienne de Durand of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris argues that the situation is now so dire that cooperation is the only avenue. Without it, Europe will lose key operational and manufacturing capabilities. It takes 10 years to build a functioning army regiment from scratch, so these and other skills are not easily recovered once lost.

Unlike at the time of Blair-Chirac St. Malo accord in 1998, he argues that there is no time for “theology” over issues such as whether the EU should have its own military capability separate from NATO, he says. “We are past these sort of debates.”

Mr. Durand’s paper on Franco-British defense cooperation, written for Britain’s Royal United Services Institute before this week’s announcements, is here. Absent this proposal, Britain’s strategic defense review has been criticized as a missed opportunity, since it has resorted to the usual civil-service solutions without taking a step back and looking at original available alternatives. One expert describes it as “no more than administrative cuts to the existing force structure.” Here’s some analysis of that from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.