EU needs to spend £60bn before Nato troops will be able to move quickly to Eastern front
Nato has been begging European nations to fix choke points for its so-called "battle map" for a decade. Now EU commissioners admit they still need to spend £60 billion before Nato troops will be able to move swiftly across Europe.
EUROPE needs to spend at least £60 billion to rapidly complete its so-called “battle map”- the rail, road, sea, and air corridors which all allow troops to move quickly to the front line in times of war. Nato has been desperately trying to persuade members states in Europe to fix crucial choke points since 2014, but have been met with obstacles including red tape and non-harmonised procedures.
One problem is that capitals in central and eastern Europe have often been unwilling to force local authorities to pay the money needed to strengthen bridges so they can carry columns of heavy armour, and widen roads. Another is that different countries have different rules. In one case tanks from one member state were denied passage through another due to exceeding weight limits set by road traffic regulations, the EU's financial watchdog said in a recent report.
This is especlaiily key on bridges in Eastern Europe.
While Western European infrastructure was often reinforced during the Cold War to handle the weight of 60-tonne NATO tanks, Eastern Europe couldn’t afford to build as robustly and, in any case, only had to accommodate much lighter Soviet tanks, like the 45-ton T-72.
Nato - which has ploughed in £4 billion of central funds into the Batle Map project - said the programme was ony half-way finished in 2018,.
But the European Commission has identified at least 500 more hot-spot projects -including the expansion of ports and airports, the widening of tunnels, and the reinforcement of railway bridges- which need urgent and quick attention.
The bloc’s EU Military Mobility project had a budget of just £1.4 billion for 2021-27.
And Brussels allocated that entire budget to Ukraine after Russia's illegal 2022 invasion, meaning that it can’t be used to fix problems on Nato's European soil for another tow years, when its coffers are replenished.
The £60 billion estimate was disclosed by EU Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius.
“We need to develop that infrastructure according to NATO planning. Then we need to see also the need to establish a very effective defence or protection of those strategically important infrastructure points, and in addition to that, we need to look into legal requirements,” ?the former Lithuanian PM told Euronews?.
The use of unspent budgets in in various so-called “cohesion funds” - including the E?U Transport budget - is being looked at, sad the commissioner, adding: “We should look for all the possibilities because the investment into the defence industry is also an investment in economic development. It's the creation of new jobs.”
Another solution to simplify the problem is the creation of a “military Schengen”.
This plan has been around for more than a decade, and has been accepted by the US and Canada, which currently require five days’ notice to move troops through European ?borders.
But while they were both allowed to sign a simple “Administrative Arrangement”, fears remain that the UK may be forced to sign a politically?-binding “Administrative Agreement” instead .
Many of the conditions contained in the Administrative Agreement do not seem to relate directly to the swift transit of troops and armour across Europe.
They range from a binding commitment that the UK “must not contravene the security and defence interests of the EU and its member states” to the sharing of all UK military intellectual property and controls over UK exports outside the EU.
The UK would be committed to EU spending targets and harmonisation of capability requirements” and terms which “which must only benefit entities which demonstrably provide added value on EU territory”.Crucially, Britain would be expected to “to exchange classified information with the EU “ in keeping with post Brexit regulations which see EU member states sharing intelligence openly.
In December 2020 Defence Secretary Ben Wallace rejected joining, “because we have serious concerns about the intellectual property rights and export controls that it would seek to impose”.
