Subject
: Process for the elaboration of the headline and capability goals
The European Council agreed in Helsinki
that "The General Affairs Council, with the participation of Defence Ministers,
will elaborate the headline and capability goals. It will develop a method
of consultation through which these goals can be met and maintained, and
through which national contributions reflecting Member States' political
will and commitment towards these goals can be defined by each Member State,
with a regular review of progress made. In addition, Member States would
use existing defence planning procedures, including, as appropriate, those
available in NATO and the Planning and Review Process (PARP) of the PfP.
These objectives and those arising, for those countries concerned, from
NATO's Defence Capabilities Initiative (DCI) will be mutually reinforcing."
At its meeting of 14 March 2000
in iPSC formation, the POCO agreed to recommend to the Council that it
should conclude that the attached "food for thought" paper on the "Elaboration
of the headline goal", including the timetable set out therein leading
to a Capabilities Pledging Conference to be convened by the end of 2000,
should constitute a basis for future work to be conducted by the competent
bodies.
ANNEX
ELABORATION OF THE HEADLINE GOAL
"FOOD FOR THOUGHT"
Introduction
The European Council, meeting on
10-11 December 1999, agreed that "by the year 2003, cooperating together
voluntarily, [Member States] will be able to deploy rapidly and then sustain
forces capable of the full range of Petersberg tasks as set out in the
Amsterdam Treaty, including the most demanding, in operations up to corps
level (up to 15 brigades or 50,000-60,000 persons). These forces should
be militarily self-sustaining with the necessary command, control and intelligence
capabilities, logistics, other combat support services and additionally,
as appropriate, air and naval elements. Member States should be able to
deploy in full at this level within 60 days, and within this to provide
smaller rapid response elements available and deployable at very high readiness.
They must be able to sustain such a deployment for at least one year. This
will require an additional pool of deployable units (and supporting elements)
at lower readiness to provide replacements for the initial forces.".
This Headline goal is intended as
a spur towards the progressive improvement of Europe's military capabilities
for crisis management operations. This process will take account of the
results of the WEU audit of assets and capabilities. The resulting capabilities
are intended to enable the conduct of effective EU-led operations, whether
or not the EU has recourse to NATO assets and capabilities as well as being
a full contribution to NATO-led operations and, for those involved, in
NATO. The European Council invited the General Affairs Council to elaborate
this goal, and other, collective capability goals, with the participation
of Defence Ministers. The GAC will also develop a method for meeting, maintaining
and reviewing these goals and through which national contributions will
be defined. In addition, Member States will use existing defence planning
procedures including, as appropriate, those available in NATO and the Planning
and Review Process (PARP) of the PfP. In the first instance it is necessary
to identify in detail the forces and capabilities required from Member
States collectively in order to achieve the headline goal. This paper focuses
on this first task. A section on further work is included at the end.
Methodology
The headline goal expressed at Helsinki
represents a political commitment by the Member States. It includes insufficient
detail for the purposes of military planning, raising questions such as
where EU-led task forces might be expected to operate, with whom, and how
often. Some of the key figures in the headline goal (e.g. 60 days) are
also open to interpretation. The elaboration of the headline goal should
follow a systematic approach. This will provide a clear link between the
policy context of the CFSP, the broad statement of the headline goal and
the detailed listing of capabilities and force elements necessary to deliver
the goal. The key steps are set out below. In particular, agreement on
the first three steps is needed before progress can be made on the later
steps of the process.
Step 1 An outline of the overall
strategic context.
Step 2 Articulation of key planning
assumptions.
Step 3 Selection of planning scenarios
that describe illustrative situations for the employment of forces.
Step 4 Identification of the force
capabilities required to support the scenarios.
Step 5 Development of illustrative
force packages that have the required capabilities and confirmation of
their effectiveness against the planning scenarios.
Step 6 Using these different force
packages to define the full range of requirements implicit in the headline
goal.
We will, once the headline goal is
elaborated in this way, need to consider the question of national contributions
to it, and to identify "capability gaps" by comparing the elaborated goal
against these. Consideration of how these tasks will be undertaken is beyond
the scope of this paper (but see the section on further work below).
Step 1. Strategic Context
In today's strategic environment,
we face new risks such as ethnic and religious conflict, inter-and intra-state
competition for scarce resources, environmental damage, population shifts.
Europe needs to be able to manage and respond to these, including by intervening
to prevent crises escalating into conflicts. This may require operations
across the full Petersberg
spectrum:
- Humanitarian and rescue tasks;
- peacekeeping task; and,
- tasks of combat forces in crisis
management, including peacemaking (referred to as peace enforcement by
some nations).
While these operations are likely
to be smaller than those envisaged during the Cold War, they will often
be more demanding in other ways. Rapid deployment at short notice to crisis
regions will be essential to deter or contain conflict. Armed forces may
have to operate in areas where the supporting infrastructure is limited,
and sustain concurrent operations for long periods. Operations will frequently
be conducted under the constant gaze of the world's media. We can increasingly
expect adversaries - armed with sophisticated, commercially available military
technology, able to extensively adapt technologies developed for civil
application and some with access to weapons of mass destruction -to employ
asymmetric approaches to disrupt our capabilities. We also expect that
there will be increased emphasis on minimising casualties (own forces,
opposing forces and civilian) and restricting collateral and environmental
damage.
Elaboration of the headline goal
will need to devote particular attention to the capabilities necessary
to ensure effective performance in crisis management in the context of
this security environment: deployability, sustainability, interoperability,
flexibility, mobility, survivability and command and control. These objectives
of capability improvement and those arising, for those countries concerned,
from NATO's Defence Capabilities Initiative, will be mutually reinforcing.
Step 2. Key Planning Assumptions
We should make the following assumptions
for the purpose of further planning:
-
Target date. The headline goal is to
be met if possible by June 2003 (and by December 2003 at the latest).
-
Geographical area. We should plan on
the basis that within the agreed range of missions, the most demanding
will occur in and around Europe. Forces should also be available and able
to respond to crises world wide, albeit at lesser scale.
-
Contributions. The headline goal is
a policy and planning commitment for the EU Member States. The scale and
nature of national contributions cannot be fully addressed until the overall
requirement is clearer. Additional contributions to the overall improvement
of European military capabilities will be invited from European NATO members
who are not EU Member States and other countries who are candidates for
accession to the European Union. We would expect other European nations
to participate in specific EU-led operations.
-
Scale of Effort. We should assume that
the most demanding mission will be a complex peace enforcement task in
a joint environment in or around Europe. In order to be able to undertake
this task as well as the rest of the full range of Petersberg missions,
the EU will require access to a ready pool of various types of combat brigades,
plus the necessary combat support and combat service support elements and
additionally appropriate maritime and air elements. It is the size of this
pool that will be defined by the scenario-based planning. This pool can
be regarded as the source from which an appropriate force package could
be constructed, depending on circumstances, of up to 50,000 - 60,000 troops.
Within any overall figure the proportion of combat troops to support troops
will vary according to the operational task. The assembled force should
be militarily self-sustaining, with the necessary command, control and
intelligence capabilities, logistics, other combat support and appropriate
maritime and air elements. We should ensure that the forces and capabilities
required to meet the most demanding mission as defined above will also
be able to undertake a range of smaller-scale or less combat-oriented contingencies,
against agreed concurrency criteria.
-
Concurrency. We should plan to be able
to conduct a single corps sized crisis management task, while retaining
a limited capability to conduct a small-scale operation, such as a NEO.
Alternatively, within the overall total of the headline Goal, we should
be prepared to maintain one longer term operation at less than the maximum
level and at the same time be able to conduct another operation of a limited
duration. It may be that this requirement will pose the most demanding
challenge for the EU member states, given the competing demands for key
assets. It is also assumed that the EU-led corps-size operation referred
to in the headline goal is not additional to the concurrency assumptions
in NATO Ministerial Guidance 98. The implications of the other concurrency
assumptions listed above will need to be analysed in connection with the
further development of NATO Ministerial Guidance 2000.
-
Endurance. We should plan to sustain
a deployment of corps size, able to undertake the most demanding mission,
for at least one year. Our initial assumption is that national commitments
of forces and capabilities, once defined, will include a commitment to
provide those elements for at least a year. This will require an additional
pool of deployable forces to provide replacements for the initial ready
force. (We note that in practice both the size of the force and the capabilities
required might reduce as normality returned, within or beyond this initial
period).
-
Readiness. We should plan for forces
to be held at graduated readiness, sufficient to deploy in full at corps
level within 60 days, from a Council decision on the forces required (equivalent
to NATO ACTORD/WEU Force Creation Message) to the point when all forces
are fully trained and deployed in a theatre of operations, in or around
Europe, with Transfer of
Authority to the Operation Commander
completed. Within this limit we should plan to provide a smaller rapid
response element of immediate reaction forces at very high readiness, particularly
of entry and other enabling forces; the scale and nature of such forces
will depend on the particular circumstances of an operation. Guidelines
will be established as part of further work.
-
Sustainability. We should plan to deploy
forces with sufficient holdings to conduct operations until their re-supply
has been established (within 10 days for air supply and 28 days for sea
supply). We should then be able to sustain the forces deployed, up to 60,000
troops, for a period of at least 12 months.
Step 3. Planning Scenarios
We have expanded the requirements
implicit in the headline goal by defining the key planning assumptions
listed above. We now need to select illustrative scenarios against which
capabilities and force packages designed to meet these requirements may
be tested. The WEU has already generated a set of illustrative Petersberg
mission profiles, including scenarios for European-led operations up to
corps sized level. These scenarios will also cover maritime and air elements.
This work should be built on for the purposes of elaborating the headline
goal. At least initially we need to identify a small number of scenarios
which would be representative of the range of different mission types the
EU might conduct.
Conclusions
The elaboration of the headline
goal called for by the European Council at Helsinki is a complex task.
To achieve the aim, Member States should first:
-
agree a systematic methodology as described
in this paper in order to establish a sound planning basis for ongoing
work (para 3);
-
agree a broad outline of strategic context
and force characteristics (paras 5-7);
-
agree key planning assumptions (para
8);
-
make use of the illustrative mission
profiles for Petersberg Missions and associated scenarios agreed by the
WEU (Reference WEU C(96)267 of 24 September 1996) (para 9);
in order to:
-
identify capability requirements and
develop illustrative force packages;
-
produce a comprehensive statement of
the pool of forces and capabilities collectively required to conduct Petersberg
Missions up to the scale of the headline goal.
Further Work
If the conclusions above are agreed,
the following further work will need to be urgently prepared:
-
a. detailed force modelling by expert
military Planners to generate proposals for the overall "headline goal"
pool of forces and capabilities;
-
analysis of this pool in comparison
with existing Member States' capabilities and the development of a method
for the identification of key shortfalls and for definition of national
contributions;
-
a method for inviting no-EU Allies to
identify additional contributions (as called for at Helsinki);
-
definition of a system for providing
regular review and incentives for Member States' progress towards the headline
goal;
-
a timetable for the conduct of this
further work.
It will be essential for all
of this further work to be closely co-ordinated with existing NATO and
PfP planning processes, since the forces involved are also being developed
and held available for NATO, or NATO-led, operations.
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