The European Union is getting a defence commissioner for the first time and he joins several European military leaders in warning war with Russia is just years away, calling for “quick decisions” to “properly prepare”.
Andrius Kubilius, a Member of the European Parliament and two-time former Prime Minister of Lithuania was nominated as the European Union’s Commissioner-designate for Defence and Space by Ursula von der Leyen this week. The veteran politician from one of Europe’s Russia-bordering, former Soviet states is charged with boosting the continent’s arms industry, if the nominations are confirmed in a forthcoming vote.
Extremely alarming warnings on the likelihood of European states, from Poland in the east to the United Kingdom in the west, having to go to actual war with Russia in the coming years have become common in recent years. Several top figures including military leaders, senior NATO figures, and strategy experts say Europe must prepare for conflict soon, or at least considerably re-arm immediately to deter future conflict.
Apparently joining that chorus, Kubilius told wires service Reuters shortly after his nomination that: “Defence ministers and NATO generals agree that Vladimir Putin could be ready for confrontation with NATO and the EU in 6-8 years… If we take these assessments seriously, then that is the time for us to properly prepare, and it is a short one. This means we have to take quick decisions, and ambitious decisions.”
The eight-year mark is at the conservative end of the scale, amid the war-is-coming community in Europe. Poland military thinkers, given their nation’s very strong support for Ukraine and their land border with both Russia and Belarus, seem to be the most alarmed, and as reported in 2023 their National Security Bureau said Europe had three years to prepare.
Estonia was on the same wavelength earlier this year, with their then-Prime Minister Kaja Kallas saying NATO has “three to five years” to prepare for Russian forces to have reconstituted themselves post-Ukraine. Coincidentally, that same Kaja Kallas is also now nominated to be a European Commissioner, taking the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President job.
NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer — undoubtably one of the military leaders EU man Kubilius referred to — said earlier this year “not everything is plannable, not everything is going to be hunky-dory for the next 20 years” and declared any coming struggle would be a matter for the whole of society, not just the military. He said in January:
…we need to understand as a society that war and fighting is not only something of the military. The nation needs to understand that when it comes to a war such as we see in Ukraine, it is a whole of society event. For many many decades we had this idea that we had the professional military and they would solve the security issues that we have, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. But if you talk collective defence, it is a whole of society event.
It will not be enough to have the present military, you will need more people from society to sustain the military in terms of people. You need the industry to have enough ammunition, to produce new tanks, new ships, new aircraft, new artillery pieces… the big difference with a year ago is a lot of things have happened in the armed forces and defence organisations. What hasn’t happened is in our societies, the understanding that it is more than the military that has to be able to operate in a conflict or in a war. It is the whole of a society that will get involved whether we like it or not.
The European Union has never had a defence commissioner before. Despite the decades-long dreams of several Eurocrats it has no army of its own and military matters remain the sole preserve of national governments. But von der Leyen’s re-election pitch as leader of the bloc promised a defence portfolio for the first time, blaming rising threats — Russia — for the bloc needing to “take the next step on defence”.
Rather than coordinating militaries themselves, then, Kubilius’s job will be more akin to an armaments minister, at least for now. Von der Leyen said in her mission statement for the Defence and Space commissioner role that “there is a lot that Europe can do to support… industry, procurement, research, innovation and much more. At the heart of this work must be one simple principle: Europe must spend more, spend better, spend European.”
They are words that will certainly cause concern in Washington and London, the traditional NATO allies of European states, who will eye any European insularism in defence procurement with concern, given the importance of the American and British defence industry’s export contracts.
Nevertheless, the weakness of the European — and broadly Western — defence industry in the wake of the Ukraine War has been brutally illustrated, with Great War-style shell starvation emerging as no supplier can make new artillery ammunition fast enough. As reported in 2023:
The 155mm artillery shell now being financed for Ukraine by the European Union is, essentially, a universal NATO round usable in several different gun models employed by dozens of countries worldwide. There are a number of companies which make the shell including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Rheinmetall in NATO. They are also made in China, India, and Russia. General Dynamics, who make 11,000 shells a month in Scranton, Pennsylvania, describes the 155mm as a “low cost munition for general Harassment and Interdiction (H&I) fire missions”.
“Low cost” or not, the price paid by the European Union consortium for an order of one million 155mm artillery shells underlines the sudden jump in prices for military materiel the ammunition-hungry Ukraine war has caused. For a piece of legacy technology that hasn’t appreciably changed in decades — and came in at just $150 a piece in the 1980s — ‘dumb’ 155mm artillery shells were already expensive before the war began at around $2,000 each. Today, as the EU deal shows, that price has doubled to $4,000.
Kubilius told Reuters European nations had underinvested in their collective militaries by a trillion dollars since the 2008 global economic crisis, something he said left the defence industry in a “unsatisfactory condition” now.