CSIS report: European defence budgets and personnel trends

Past defense spending and military personnel trends indicate future European forces may be smaller and better equipped than today's forces, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The CSIS report, released April 28, focused on defense budgets and personnel trends for European countries from 2001 to 2006. Overall, European countries' active troop levels have dropped 12 percent and total defense spending has increased 2.6 percent. But defense investment - spending for procurement and research and development - has increased 26 percent per soldier.

The numbers, especially the increase in per-soldier defense investment, may show Europe is committed to transforming its military, the report's authors said.

"We think that European countries might be moving toward a force transformation which means they are better equipped and have fewer soldiers," said Wan-Jung Chao, the report's lead researcher.

"However, even when some countries are becoming more capable in combat, they might not have the airlift or they might have other caveats about what operations they can conduct," she added. "Therefore, by merely looking at numbers in the report, it might be less certain to predict that we can rely more on their contributions in international operations."

Almost every country cut its number of active personnel from 2001 to 2006, Chao said. In that time, European countries' total defense budgets increased only slightly, from $272 billion to $279 billion, in constant 2006 dollars. Part of the reason for the small increase is the drop in personnel, which consumes a large portion of European defense budgets, Chao said. Other factors include increasing costs for other priorities, like social welfare programs such as education and health care, leaving less money for defense.

"Personnel costs and the costs of maintaining equipment are only going to rise, so ultimately the trends we have begun to see emerging in Europe will have to be sustained if better military capability is to be generated," said Guy Ben-Ari, another author on the report and a fellow with Defense Industrial Initiatives Group at CSIS.

Though some might consider the slight increase in total defense spending worrisome, the increase in investment per soldier is encouraging, Ben-Ari said.

"If we are indeed seeing the beginning of a "transformation" [smaller, better equipped forces] in European militaries, as indicated by the numbers in our report, then maybe larger defense budgets are not necessary because Europe will have smaller militaries and will spend more money per soldier."

The six countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom - that signed the Letter of Intent on defense industry reform in 1998 account for the lion's share of European defense spending, according to the report. In 2006, for example, their combined defense budgets made up almost 74 percent of the total.

Yet 10 relatively recent additions to the European Union have increased their budgets 14.5 percent during the period, compared with 2.5 percent growth for Europe overall, the report found. Those 10 countries are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Despite dropping troop levels overall, the total number of European forces deployed abroad in combat, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, humanitarian and other operations has gone up, from slightly over 65,000 in 2001 to 80,000 in 2006, not including the number of troops stationed overseas on a long-term basis, according to CSIS.

Defense spending has been eclipsed by growth in gross domestic product in the European countries, CSIS found. As a share of GDP, most countries' growth rates are negative, indicating that economic growth has outpaced the increase in defense spending.

The report covered trends for the 25 members of the European Union as of 2006, plus Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia and Montenegro, Romania, Switzerland and Turkey.

Source: A. Boessenkool - Defense News

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