Dress me slowly, I'm in a hurry

Despite having spent eighty years living on bread and water and waiting for the ‘cousin’ on the other side of the Atlantic to come to our aid every time we feel threatened internally or externally, and despite the fact that various important sources have been warning us about this at every turn, we have not learnt anything and we have not even laid the foundations to resolve a serious crisis situation ourselves. 


Europe has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history, war was something distant, almost forgotten, that did not affect us, even when the drums and cannon fire rumbled in our very ears or at our very borders. We thought Uncle Sam would be there to nip any external pretensions or excessive expansionism on the part of a close partner or member of the same club of cronies in the bud.

Little by little and through internal degeneration, the much-vaunted and much-cited EU has become, in reality, an economic and social club dedicated to spending money hand over fist, to legislating even on how the plastic caps on bottles made of the aforementioned material should be hung, talking about denuclearisation, clean energy, electric cars, the protection of the animal world and the countryside in general and taxing us to death for anyone who dares to move their head or get out of the picture. 

There have been many voices and initiatives of various kinds on security and defence that have been put on the table for more than a decade. Initiatives which, for various reasons, have not found the response or support minimally necessary to bear fruit and become something real or, at least, the embryo of an entity easily convertible into a much larger organisation or military alliance which, in any case, would be its own, exclusively European and equipped with more than enough material and which would not require external technologies or support for its use and direction. These are matters which, if not previously assured, are very cumbersome since they always, and without remedy, translate into big problems if they are not solved beforehand. 


I remember that when I was a young major, studying staff work at the school of that name, the organisation and tactics teachers always made us highlight and think about the convenience and requirement of correctly defining and adequately filling in what is known as a Plan-Programme-Budget. 


In the first phase of the plan, we have to define specifically the threats we have to cover, identify their possible avenues and modes of action, quantify them and confront them with our possibilities and capacities after a long and detailed confrontation and comparison of some capacities against others. 

In this phase, it is very important to define the objectives, the doctrine of employment and, above all, the chain of command itself and, fundamentally, the points of no return. 


This phase, if carried out sincerely and in earnest, will give us many clues as to the chances of success, help us to quantify new needs in terms of resources and material and, above all, clues as to the degree of preparation and training required of our own forces. It goes without saying that it is essential that, when defining the material to be used, it is also necessary to establish whether it is new and who is going to provide it, whether a few or all together. 

These plans will result in a diverse series of programmes for the selection and acquisition of the necessary material, for the selective search and training of the necessary troops and their replacement, they will help us to quantify the time needed for the accumulation of the necessary material and the location of the instruction and training centres to effectively and jointly simulate operations of this name in each country or combined operations with the participation of forces from several countries. 


Once both phases have been completed and redefined, if necessary, we reach the painful point of checking what budget is necessary and/or if we should adjust to one already defined previously (as in this case), and then see if all the needs are covered in the required amounts, what points are left up in the air, bearing in mind that if the possible resulting imbalances are insurmountable, it will be necessary to start the process again, adjust it or discard it completely. 

All this, defined and stated in a schematic and quite simple way, is not at all simple in reality, nor is it necessary to wait for it to be fulfilled or covered quickly and with two strokes of the pen. If it is not drawn up with cleanliness, sincerity and without any chauvinism, failure is served up on the table waiting for the diners. We cannot expect to use obsolete material in modern combat, nor can we wait for Cousin Donald to take pity on us and come to our rescue when we are up to our necks in it because, honestly, I don't see him being very keen to do so. 


Each member cannot provide equipment of all types of calibre, of dubious precision, with a variety of operating instructions and, above all, if we do not have them in the precise and sufficient quantities to sustain long-term combat. At present, Europe has, still in production, several models of battle tanks and tracked troop transport vehicles of varying ages, degrees of protection, accuracy of their weapons and types of weapons and their calibres. The same is true of some models of attack and transport helicopters; and also of aerial combat and transport vehicles and cyber-intelligence and electronic warfare systems. And last but not least, artillery pieces and rocket launchers. 


Do we need a European military force? Yes, but not at any price. It cannot and should not be formed by a flood of aid as has happened with European aid to Ukraine to date - with such a disastrous memory and result. It is highly doubtful that it is effective to fix a random amount of millions, however exorbitant it may seem; it is necessary to have a complete plan-programme-budget, even if it is in a basic form and in the absence of subsequent and successive redefinitions and refinements, and as we are beginning to see and as the British say, ‘it is not a simple cup of coffee’. 


Haste has never been nor is it a good counsellor and to go to war against a colossus, which, although in decline, has direct and indirect internal and external support of a certain substance and which, moreover, has come to occupy a preferential place in relations with the USA, it is necessary to be very clear about what we want to do and, what is more important, whether with the means and the will to fight that we have, we can do it with a sufficient guarantee of success without getting our fingers burnt. 


An ignominious defeat at the hands of Putin would be the worst result of this adventure, impossible to erase; hence the need for good planning, sufficient resources and little or no haste. It could be that this is the result that some in the complicated international arena are hoping for.