A signal lesson from NATO's 78-day air campaign in Kosovo pointed out a shocking reality, according to Jose Cutileiro, the WEU secretary general who is being replaced this week by Javier Solana, the European Union's new High Representative for Security and Foreign Affairs and former MATO chief

Caption: Secretary General of the minister council of the Western European Union (WEU), Jose Cutileiro of Portugal, speaks during a press conference at the end of the WEU summit in Bremen 11 May 1999 - Photo by Ingo Wagner Copyright AFP

"Our armed forces are not useable for the tasks that we need them for," he told a press briefing in Brussels last Friday.

As an example, said Cutileiro, Europeans have now deployed in Kosovo "everything they can deploy, and yet only about two percent of the alleged European military forces are there."

As for the other 98 percent, he said, "we are unable to move them there, keep them there, install them and keep them fit and trim. So these are the problems."

The solutions to those problems, he said, were less clear.

"For the EU to develop a real military capacity, and I'm not talking about defense or Article 5 (a mutual defense against territorial attack), but crisis management, to be ready to take care of that, it has to have very good relations with NATO and be able to use NATO assets and capabilities and consult very clearly and transparently with NATO."

In the wake of the NATO defense ministers meeting in Toronto in September, which focused on a "European pillar" of the Atlantic alliance that could function autonomously in crisis situations using NATO materiel and expertise, the WEU did an exhaustive audit of its defense spending.

That audit, to be fine-combed here this week, made painfully clear that, as one source put it, the WEU was not getting nearly enough "bang for its buck." Europe was spending a lot, perhaps, but not wisely.

Facing a post-cold war future where crisis management will largely displace war, Europe needs to do some hard thinking about how much, and how, it allocates its defense spending, said Cutileiro.

"National defense budgets must begin to reflect a new political state of mind, and to date this has not been the case," he said.

Hard decisions are going to have to be made before the European Union summit in Helsinki December 10-11.

In the Kosovo lesson, he said, Europe discovered to its dismay that it had serious problems in satellite intelligence and strategic transport. In other words, it didn't know where or how to move the materiel it had to deal with the problem at hand.

In Kosovo, Cutileiro acknowledged, "the Americans were running the show."

European armies, he said, need to get a firmer grip on things. World War II is history, and the 21st century poses a whole new range of defense problems that Europe is going to have to deal with.

Last week, French Defense Minister Alain Richard assured a meeting of his EU counterparts, "We are not starting from scratch. The European capabilities are not negligible ... but we have to concentrate on the qualitative aspect of this potential."

At that meeting, Britain and France proposed that Europe, by 2002 to 2003, possess the capacity to deploy a rapid reaction force of some 50,000 troops in a peace-keeping operation in or around the EU.

For such a military land force to be deployable for one to two years, a force of two to three times the size -- up to 150,000 troops -- would have to be trained and ready, the meeting agreed.

The Helsinki summit is to take a decision on the deployment of such a force.

The WEU, created in 1955, is Europe's only military wing. It has 10 full members: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Britain. In addition, it has six associate members which are also NATO members. It has five observer members which are also EU members. And it has seven associate partners which have all signed a Europe Agreement with the EU.

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