Description
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the EU Member States’ failure to independently evacuate their citizens from Afghanistan in 2021, has brought the EU’s rapid reaction capabilities to the fore. Within the Strategic Compass, the EU sets out a proposal to create a Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC). However, the EU Battlegroup Concept, on which it is based, has been at full operational capacity since 2007 and has never used. This paper argues that understanding the lessons from the Battlegroups will provide significant insights into the RDC and whether it will be deployable. Hence the research questions are: 1. What lessons can be drawn from the EU Battlegroup Concept? 2. How far does the EU Rapid Deployment Capacity learn the lessons of the Battlegroups and thus avoid the challenges afflicting them? The paper uses the concepts of norms and path dependency to underpin the analysis. The research has important implications for the EU’s rapid reaction capacity and for the capability initiatives currently ongoing in CSDP. After all, if the political willingness is not there to engage in the process of developing and deploying capabilities, then this will lead to a sub-optimal CSDP which fails to have ‘strategic autonomy’.
