UK blocks plans for 'EU command'

Plans for a single European command and control facility have been blocked by the British government after being proposed by EU foreign policy chief Baroness Catherine Ashton.

The single site command centre proposed at a meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers could have been located in Britain, according to reports, and its 250 staff would provide facilities to coordinate military action by European countries around the world.

At a press conference following the council meeting Ashton said: "We talked about a report that I put before member states on common security and defence policy. This is a real opportunity to try to fulfil what the Lisbon Treaty was all about, which was to bring together the different ways that Europe operates in the world."

She added: "The position of the British government is the same as the previous government on an operational headquarters, and so isn't a change of anything. It wasn't a surprise to me." She said many member states were interested in exploring the idea.

Stephen Booth, of the Open Europe think tank, said if approved the move could "potentially threaten Britain's primary military alliance, which remains with the United States via NATO".

Conservative Defence Spokesman in the European Parliament, Geoffrey Van Orden, said the move was "immediately" blocked by Foreign Secretary William Hague.

"The EU brings no additional military capabilities to the table, takes on no additional European share of the transatlantic defence burden. Instead, it is yet another call on the same diminishing pool of national armed forces and is a serious distraction from NATO, which should be the main focus of international military commitment for the democracies.

"While NATO struggles to persuade its member states to contribute to strategically vital missions, such as Libya, the EU continues to spend money and effort copying NATO's structures and desperately trying to find military tasks on which it can stick its badge," said Van Orden.

"It is ridiculous that co-ordination mechanisms between the EU and NATO are now required to enable more or less the same nations to talk to themselves in different locations in Brussels".

"NATO has a large, long-established and well-practised planning staff at its SHAPE headquarters in Mons and an operational command presence in the UK and other countries. Now the EU wants to duplicate this with its own operational headquarters. Although its motive is otherwise, it tries to justify this by claiming some unique amalgam of civil and military capabilities. I congratulate our ministers on refusing to cave in."

A single coastguard service covering the entire continent was also set to be announced and blocked by government. British shipping minister Mike Penning said: "A European coastguard is not a concept we support."

This article first appeared on defencemanagment.com, a sister site of PublicServiceEurope.com