Russia’s war in Ukraine has underscored the importance of effective air and missile defence for the protection of both units on the battlefield and infrastructure behind the front lines. The war has also served as a reminder that while Europe’s air and missile defence has long been recognised as a critical capability shortfall, NATO Allies and EU Member States have not acted with sufficient resolve to rectify this situation.
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Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), established by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, was intended to create a framework for the most willing and able Member States (MS) to cooperate on defence within the EU. It was activated by 23 of them in 2017. Today, all MS except Malta participate. This brief examines PESCO’s contribution to the EU’s growing defence ambitions and sets out the challenges ahead.
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NATO’s heads of state and government meet this week for their second summit after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s war and its consequences will again dominate the agenda.
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While Baltic security thinking has long been dominated by assessments of the risk of Russian military aggression in Europe, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was still a shock in its brutality and scale. It has led the three Baltic states to further increase defence spending and to accelerate the building of national defence capabilities.
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Robotic platforms, artificial intelligence, and weapons with autonomous functions have become central to defence innovation. Major powers rely on emerging technologies to achieve and maintain strategic advantages over their potential adversaries. Yet more developed AI-based solutions produce not only more sophisticated technologies but also a not-less-sophisticated set of problems.
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Defence spending has often been the cause of bitter arguments among NATO Allies. In today’s worsened security environment, Allies will doubtless need to return to this thorny topic at their July summit in Vilnius.
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French president Emmanuel Macron caused quite a stir with his recent statement¹ that France would not retaliate with nuclear weapons against Russia if the Kremlin launched a nuclear strike on Ukraine. A follow-on tweet² from his official Twitter account saying “we do not want a world war” only added to the backlash on social media. While this messaging was in line with that from other allies—and did not express any intention to abandon Ukraine for the sake of avoiding a nuclear war—it was widely interpreted as, at the very least, undermining deterrence³. Although some of the harsher reactions are quite misguided, the episode raises a legitimate question about whether the French nuclear deterrent carries much weight in protecting Europe as a whole from rogue nuclear regimes.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine has undoubtedly been game-changing for Europe’s security, challenging the long-held beliefs and assumptions of many Western nations and prompting dramatic shifts in policy, for example, in Germany, Finland, and Sweden. The war’s conduct has also produced significant surprises, not least the unexpectedly poor performance of Russia’s supposedly reformed military.
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In the third brief of the series, Dr Ronald Ti examines Russia’s failures in planning and executing logistics operations for its war in Ukraine. In large part, these failures can be attributed to systemic weaknesses such as its ‘push’ (rather than ‘pull’) approach to expeditionary logistics, overly centralised command, a lack of non-commissioned officers, and a culture of bullying and corruption.
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The Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and the Estonian Ministry of Rural Affairs commissioned the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) to compile a list of civilian food and emergency goods supplies, estimated average amounts of supplies at home and in stores, and calculations for the price of national emergency goods supplies and logistics.
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