French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed a new EU elite defense force comprised of forces from the six biggest EU states: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Poland. According to the EU Observer,

French mp Pierre Lellouche, a spokesman on defense for Mr. Sarkozy, recently presented the idea and conditions for countries to join the defense “hard core” group in the French daily Le Figaro.It is envisaged that the six countries would adopt common rules for reinforced cooperation, such as spending a minimum of 2 percent of their gdp on defense, join a common defense equipment market and provide 10,000 troops for an intervention force.Moreover, the elite group would commit to carry out joint security anti-terrorism projects, as well as defense infrastructure programs, such as missile defense or space and intelligence technology.According to the Brussels weekly European Voice, Paris aims to launch the initiative in 2009, after the new EU Lisbon Treaty has been ratified in all member states, as it contains a provision for “permanent structured cooperation,” which could establish a legal link for the core defense project to be set up.

Taken as a whole, EU member nations currently have a combined defense budget of $232 billion, second only to the United States. Europe is not as strong militarily as it could be, and wants to be, however. Any effort the European Union makes in streamlining its forces reduces the multiple layers of overlap and wasted spending and therefore goes a long way toward boosting Europe’s military capabilities. The EU Observer article also points out:

The idea of a joint market for defense equipment also featuring at the EU level, with the European Commission pushing for a deal which could secure more efficient spending among all the bloc’s member states. …According to the Commission, a common defense market would significantly improve the military capabilities of member states without increasing defense expenditures.

TheTrumpet.com wrote about this in 2005:

At this point, Europe isn’t getting the biggest bang for its buck. Analysts estimate that, for as much as it spends on defense, its military capability is only about 10 percent of the U.S.’s because of “high wage and pension bills, obsolete equipment and lack of integration between EU armed forces” (upi, March 30). Though EU nations spend a combined $39 billion on new military equipment (the U.S. spends $100 billion), they “get a fraction of the return on their investment because of duplication in research and development and national barriers to open competition in the defense sector” (ibid.). The single market that the EU has created has not applied to defense matters, as military procurements have always been a more sensitive issue—a matter of individual national policy. This has meant that EU nations, though spending as much money as they do, are doing so independent of each other—meaning nations are duplicating work and reinventing the wheel.All this is about to change.

The Trumpet has repeatedly predicted that the EU will rise to become a dominant military power. This cannot happen until the armies of its member states are working together. As individual member nations’ forces continue to take steps toward marching under one banner, EU defense spending will become far more efficient, and the Union will become far more powerful. Watch for European nations to push for further integration of their armies as the EU continues to rise.