THERE'D BE NO NEED FOR TINKERS:

EU's Fragmented Defense Market Thwarts Bid to Bolster Military (Bloomberg, 4/30/04)

The European Union's efforts to start combining its defense forces face at least 15 hurdles: the national procurement policies of its member states.

In the past year, the EU has set up its own military planning staff and begun assembling a rapid-response force. It also has created an armaments agency. And, after the Madrid terrorist attacks on March 11, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, welcomed a plan to boost security-research spending at the EU level to 1 billion euros ($1.19 billion) from 20 million euros a year.

With a combined defense budget of 160 billion euros and 1.6 million troops, the EU boasts the world's second-largest military force. Yet EU countries themselves spend only 30 billion euros on procurement and 10 billion euros on research at the national level, according to the Centre for European Reform in London. Their spending often results in duplication, said Timothy Garden, a former assistant staff chief at the U.K. Ministry of Defence.

"You don't get away in the end from the fact that the programming of each set of defense equipment is done nationally, and you are looking at 15 armies, 14 air forces and 13 navies,'' said Garden, 59, who is now an associate fellow at the London- based Royal Institute of International Affairs.

European governments should match their defense industry's efforts to consolidate, said Tomas Valasek, director of the Center for Defense Information in Brussels. "If they want more bang for their buck, then the answer lies in harmonizing procurement, ordering from the same sources, going for economies of scale," he said.

And bacon should grow on trees, but this is the real world, not fantasy land.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 1, 2004 5:20 PM