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THE END OF THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?

The Secret Realignment of UK Defence Policy with the EU - Military Photos

How the secret realignment of UK defence procurement will mean that the UK will no longer be able to co-operate militarily with the US……at a cost to the UK of £14 billion. One of the most significant – yet largely unreported – political developments of recent years is the move being made by the UK to integrate its armed forces with those of the EU.

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In turn, it will be increasingly hard for the UK either to fight independently or to co-operate militarily with the US. The special relationship will be at an end. That is the conclusion of Richard North in The Wrong Side of the Hill: the secret realignment of UK defence policy with the EU, published on Thursday, 13 October 2005 by the Centre for Policy Studies. As Major-General Julian Thompson writes in the Foreword to the pamphlet, “the British public should be shocked by what is revealed”. What is even more alarming is the extent to which the British Government has been at pains to conceal and even to deny its true military and political agenda. The pattern of the procurement policy now being followed by the MoD means that the capabilities of the armed forces of the UK and the US are rapidly moving apart. This policy is traced back to the St Malo agreement in 1998 which in turn led to the EU’s decision to establish a multi-national ‘European Rapid Reaction Force’ (ERRF) as the centrepiece of its new military ambitions.

The repercussions of this decision are made infinitely greater by the fact that both the US and the EU stand today on the edge of a technical revolution in warfare, centred on satellites, electronics and a new generation of vehicles, unmanned aircraft and weapons systems (“net-centric warfare”). So closely co-ordinated will the forces of the future need to be through their technology that it will be virtually impossible for forces working under different systems to work alongside one another. Until recently the UK and the US were still working in close partnership in developing the technology required to achieve this revolution in the nature of warfare. But in the past year or two, the MoD’s procurement policy has shifted away from co-operation with the US towards closer dependence on Britain’s EU partners. Almost across the board, the MoD is now turning its back on joint defence projects with the US, even where these involve British firms. As a result, the MoD is buying inferior or more costly equipment than that which Anglo-US contractors could supply. The potential cost is estimated at £14 billion (see pp 48-49).The nature of the equipment now being bought for the UK’s armed forces implies not just a growing technical divergence between the ERRF and Nato but also a doctrinal conflict with established US and Nato practice.

It will be increasingly difficult for forces on each side of this divide to work together, or even to share the same battlezones. The situation is compounded by the EU’s formal co-operation with China, a strategic rival of the US. This includes the Galileo satellite global positioning system, in which the UK is an equal partner. Because of potential technology leakage from the EU to China, the US is increasingly reluctant to share its technology with Britain. The problems of UK-US co-operation are therefore being exacerbated further. It will soon be too late to reverse this trend. The Commission is now also proposing to control intra-EU movements of military products, thereby making the actions of the British Army dependent on her EU partners’ consent. The UK would be irreversibly committed to operating within a framework defined by European Union interests. The special relationship would be over.

October 13, 2005 at 10:45 PM in Special Relationship | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home