In late January, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland signed an agreement to create a military transport corridor between the countries, giving a much-needed boost to the long-discussed but rarely realized goal of improving military mobility across Europe. Siemtje Moller, Germany’s parliamentary secretary of state for defence, said the corridor takes military mobility “on the road to true military Schengen”. It is not the first time that European policymakers have initiated the idea of adapting the existing visa-free movement of people and commercial goods within the Schengen zone to the movement of troops and military equipment in Europe. But this idea is now clearly gaining momentum.
The idea of a military Schengen first appeared after the annexation of Crimea to Russia. Ten years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and two years after its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Europe realizes it must better prepare for the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to use his military even further west. European military officials are now exploring the lessons learned in the Cold War – among them specific lessons about military mobility, according to an article published in the political magazine Foreign Policy under the title “The Era of ‘Military Schengen’ Is Coming”.
However, several experts, diplomats and military sources told Foreign Policy that progress is much slower than desired. “Everyone supports the liberalization of the rules,” Tomasz Szatkowski, Poland’s permanent representative to NATO, told Foreign Policy. “But the problem is that we have been talking about it since 2015”. They said Europe has acknowledged that Cold War-era tensions may have returned and that European countries have a “long way to go” to effectively move their people and material.
The process of acceptance of anything related to a military mission in Europe is fraught with obstacles – from bureaucratic hurdles and infrastructural holes that can cause decisive delays. Urmas Paet, a European Union (EU) parliamentarian from Estonia and vice-chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, rated military mobility three out of 10 and said it could currently take between “several weeks or at least more than a week” to send supplies to the Baltic states.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former NATO commander who was an early proponent of “military Schengen” and probably made thatterm, said the good thing is that over the past few years at least the conversation has started. “Now I hear ministers in various organizations talking about it,” he said from the recent Munich Security Conference.
Hodges emphasized that the ability to move quickly in times of crisis is a key part of the military’s deterrence doctrine. ”The ability of the armed forces to mobilize and move quickly should be visible to the enemy and deter them from attacking, ” he said.
The European Defense Agency, which coordinates EU defense cooperation, is working to standardize bureaucratic processes for land and air mobility and is developing a common template to simplify paperwork. However, although 25 member states have agreed on this, there is reluctance on the part of member states that have not yet integrated these “technical arrangements” into their national processes.
It is often difficult to push all 27 members of the EU and more than 30 of NATO towards consensus, but Hodges has reason for hope since the last NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Last July, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced three regional defense plans — the first since the end of the Cold War. He said that NATO will plan and strengthen its deterrence in the Atlantic and the European Arctic in the north, centrally in the Baltic region and Central Europe, and in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the south, N1 writes.
E.Dz.
