The new Capability Development Plan

At the German Rhine resort of Petersberg in June 1992, foreign and defence ministers of the Western European Union (WEU) pledged to develop an operational role for their armed forces after Europe’s failure to come together as civil war broke out in former Yugoslavia.

After much soul-searching, so came the Petersberg tasks, and some years later, the European Union’s common security and defence policy. In Petersberg near Bonn, the WEU’s Member States declared that they were “prepared to make available military units from the whole spectrum of their conventional armed forces for military tasks”.

While the WEU was dissolved in 2010-2011, there, says Stefano Cont, lie the origins of the EU’s Capability Development Plan (CDP) to address long-term security and defence challenges. “After Petersberg, the question quickly became: what kind of forces and capabilities would be needed? So it was mainly a force planning at the beginning, very similar to the old NATO system, before the NDPP,” says Cont, referring to the NATO Defence Planning Process. (See EDM pages 29-31).

Today, the CDP is a far more sophisticated beast. It looks at future security scenarios and makes recommendations about the capabilities European militaries will need to react to a variety of potential developments. As a comprehensive planning method, providing a picture of European military capabilities over time, it can be used by Member States’ defence planners when identifying priorities and opportunities for cooperation.

Cont, a general on leave from the Italian military, stresses that this is not a cyclical exercise. Today’s review is the first in five years, and the CDP has evolved over time. “The revision of the CDP was supposed to happen when Member States agreed that the situation had changed to a point that we needed to re-address capability development.” Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was one of those moments, bringing full-scale conventional war back to Europe for the first time since World War II.

Still, one thing that was there in European defence planning at the beginning and remains, Cont says, is the focus on how to develop the necessary capabilities in a cooperative way. That is because of the advantages of economies of scale, the promise of overcoming fragmentation and seeking the interoperability of European forces.

“Planning and priorities have changed from looking at what was needed at the operational level to becoming a tool to define what should be the priorities at European level. Capability development and priorities should be addressed together,” Cont says.

Crossroads

If that sounds straightforward, the reality has been anything but. In 2008, when the European Union was shaken by the global financial crisis, every Member State began cutting its military budgets and, with a few exceptions, in an uncoordinated way. A shift in operations to expeditionary missions in Afghanistan, in a significant departure from 40 years of Cold War deterrence in which NATO forces never operated ‘out of area’, also shifted the balance in capabilities. “All the air defence capabilities were reduced to the minimum, indispensable level,” asserts Cont. “Tanks, ground combat capability and artillery were heavily reduced. And of course, artillery stocks were heavily reduced.”

With each country independently assessing its needs, and independently coming to the same conclusion, Cont recalls U.S political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. “The apparent economic and political liberalism had triumphed, triggering the decline of warfare,” Cont explains. Even if Europe faced failing states, war, Islamist militancy and a refugee crisis at its borders, the thinking was that defence and security was a problem policing and stabilising. “For that you didn’t need heavy weaponry, you don’t need artillery,” he says.

Against such a backdrop, it remains a matter of debate whether the Capability Development Plan was cynically accepted by Member States as a diverting tactic or maintained as a genuine focus for peacekeeping – as envisaged by the Petersburg tasks. “Being able to do everything was in vogue, with ‘360 degrees’ being the buzzword,” Cont says. “There were 38 priorities in 2008.”

Today, the EU is focusing on 22 areas in a clearer approach with the need for full-spectrum capabilities and over a more detailed timeframe. Asked what might future success stories be from those within the CDP, Cont lists four areas where he would like to see quick European progress as a group:

• Military mobility
• Cyber defence
• Protection of undersea networks
• Integrated air and missile defence

CDP’s four strands

Cont says that EDA and its partner the European Union Military Staff see ever more clearly how to design the capability development in the short, medium and long term. “And that will help the implementation phases for Member States,” Cont says. He also says another element in the past was the confusion between the NATO process and the CDP.

“In essence, both the NDPP and the CDP aim to help countries deal with gaps and make improvements to their militaries,” Cont says. “Capability development is much more complicated than just producing military equipment. Without highly trained armed forces, logistical support, fuel, supplies and a clear doctrine, no amount of industrial production will make ships sail or fighter jets fly.”

Both processes seek to support the military ambition of each organisation by agreeing on collective operational requirements. However, CDP also brings in three other strands to its analysis, focusing on long-term trends, future technologies and lessons learned from operations. These four strands help agree priorities that Member States should fold into their national plans.

Cont likens CDP to studying for a university degree. “We can provide support to the classes, tell you what books to read, provide many of the tools,” Cont says. “We try to show what is needed in terms of the focus. The CDP is the reference point,” he adds.

Does that not just make it a giant bureaucratic exercise? “The first rule of EDA is priority setting. The second step is to foster collaboration between Member States to implement those priorities. The third is to coordinate all these efforts at the European level to reach the objective of more European defence.”

Cont says a shift is underway to turn analysis into real projects and real opportunities. “That can be in different formats, with a regional approach, or perhaps a framework nation approach, so one or two countries lead the development of a project, or at the European level, for example. We are not just here to produce reports.”