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.