In May, the European Union’s 27 Ministers of Defence approved the European Defence Agency’s 2024 Long-Term Review (LTR). A binding policy document for EDA, the LTR lays out responsibilities for the Agency, with a stronger focus on supporting Member States through the full development cycle of military capabilities. EDA now has five core tasks, rising from the three outlined in the previous, 2017 LTR. This time, aggregating demand towards joint procurement and defence innovation come into greater focus.
When writing a mission statement, one starting point for inspiration might be U.S. professor Michael Porter’s quote: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”. For the European Defence Agency, however, that was taken care
of during its establishment almost 20 years ago, and in its legal basis, the ‘Council Decision’ of October 2015. EDA is neither an intelligence-gathering agency nor does it not conduct military operations. It is far from being a kind of
EU Ministry of Defence.
For years, it was enough to have the three tasks of being: 1) the main intergovernmental tool at EU level for deciding capability priorities; 2) the preferred defence cooperation forum, giving management support at EU level; 3) the bridge between
Member States and wider EU policies.
But a new impetus in defence collaboration since 2017 with the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF), as well as other initiatives, already meant EDA was playing a greater role than in the past, with its advice
sought by EU institutions and taking on more project management both as part of the PESCO secretariat and in the EDF.
“Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine accelerated that dynamic,” says Etienne de Durand, who is EDA’s de-facto chief of staff and led the LTR reform negotiations with Member States. “We were being asked to be even
more ambitious in our work, given the geopolitical context,” de Durand says. “But it was also important for EDA to set out what we can, and cannot do, even with the broader mandate we have now. The LTR is both a mission statement and
an identity statement,” he explains.
With a letter sent to Member States in December 2023 from EDA’s Head of Agency Josep Borrell, so began the intense process of steering the review by de Durand and his team, the Chief Executive’s Policy Office. This time, EDA did not have
the luxury of taking a year to consider its path forward by circulating long, thoughtful papers, as it did in 2016 for the previous LTR.