[Marulus]

NATO chief calls for military tie-ups with EU

Sat Mar 15, 2008

By Mark John

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer called on Saturday for wide-ranging military cooperation between the transatlantic alliance and the European Union to make better use of costly defense resources.

He made the call at a time when France is preparing possible steps to return to the NATO military structures it quit in the 1960s and to unveil proposals for the second half of this year aimed at boosting the 27-nation EU's fledgling defense power.

"I would like to see much more pooling of our capabilities, especially in areas such as ... transport helicopters, or in research and development, or in harmonizing our force structures and training methods," de Hoop Scheffer said.

He told a security conference in Brussels it was vital that NATO and the EU had equal access to the armies of their member countries, more than 20 of which belong to both bodies.

"If we duplicate -- or worse, go off in different directions -- we will both fail," he told the conference, organized by the German Marshall Fund think-tank.

The EU is becoming increasingly active in security missions across the world, from Kosovo in the Balkans to eastern Chad in Africa, but has yet to take on operations on the scale of NATO's 43,000-strong mission to bring peace to Afghanistan.

It has an agreement with NATO known as "Berlin Plus" under which it can call on alliance resources if needed. But cooperation between the two has in practice been impeded by a dispute between NATO ally Turkey and non-NATO Cyprus.

Western armies are increasingly complaining of shortages of key equipment such as helicopters and transport aircraft as they take part in numerous multinational security missions around the world.

Most of their military budgets are static or shrinking, and only a handful of NATO members are hitting an alliance target of spending two percent of national output on defense.

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced last year that France was ready to rejoin NATO's military command structure, from which General Charles de Gaulle abruptly withdrew in 1966.

The prospect of one of the EU's big powers playing a more central role in NATO has raised prospects of better ties between the two key Western organizations, but Paris has yet to set out clearly its conditions for such a change.

Sarkozy was quoted last year as saying he wanted both European defense integration to move forward and NATO to reserve top positions for the French. More details are expected in April as part of new French policy proposals on defense.

In his speech, de Hoop Scheffer also called for a revamp of the "strategic concept" document underpinning NATO policy to address growing challenges such as cyberterrorism and security threats stemming from global warming.

He urged NATO members to begin work on an "Atlantic Charter" that would be ready by a summit in 2009 and would set out broad guidelines for such a policy revision.

(Reporting by Mark John, editing by Tim Pearce)

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