A major theme of Mark Steyn’s superb new book America Alone is that Europe is doomed by demography. With all of its countries reproducing at far less than replacement rate (several are close to halving every generation), the continent is on track to become a vast, underpopulated theme park, into which, inevitably, our age’s counterpart to the Huns and the Vandals will migrate. This time they won’t need an Adrianople to open the way, and there will be no prospect of a second Catalaunian Fields.
A new study presented to the European Defense Agency shows how bleak the prospects are for military robustness in a society that every year gives birth to fewer and fewer young men. As summarized by The Daily Telegraph:
The vision of Europe in 20 years’ time was drawn up at the invitation of defence ministers by the EU body, which exists to push for more common spending and research by EU defence ministries and industries.
The paper, An Initial Long-Term Vision for European Defence Capability and Capacity Needs, paints a Europe in which plunging fertility rates leave the military struggling to recruit young men and women of fighting age, at a time when national budgets will be under unprecedented strain to pay for greying populations.
At the same time, increasingly cautious voters and politicians may be unwilling to contemplate casualties, or “potentially controversial interventions abroad – in particular interventions in regions from where large numbers of immigrants have come.”
Voters will also be insistent on having backing from the United Nations for operations, and on crafting large coalitions of EU member states with a heavy involvement of civilian agencies, and not just fighting units, the paper states. They will also want military operations to be environmentally friendly, where possible.
The “regions from where large numbers of immigrants have come” means, of course, those dominated by Islam. In hopes of avoiding giving offense to what will by then be a powerful voting bloc, the paper urges the EU to alter its concept of the purpose of military operations. As the German Press Association puts it,
Future military operations by the European Union will focus on bringing security and stability to conflict zones rather than achieving victory against conventional enemies, a report submitted to the bloc's defence chiefs saidMonday. . . .
Given the changing nature of global threats, EU military interventions in the future will “not necessarily involve fighting battles,” it said.
Instead the focus will be on “diplomacy in preventing wars from occurring, containing those conflicts that do occur and discouraging the emergence of parties whose objective it is to contribution to the generation of a crisis.”
As such, the objective will not be victory, but moderation, balance of interests and peaceful resolution of conflicts, the report underlined, adding that in fact, armed forces will be only one component of EU security operations.
Well, everybody would rather jaw-jaw than war-war. Unhappily, those who lack the capacity to fight will be ignored when they try to talk.
Is it any wonder that European governments are reluctant to let the soldiers whom they have “committed” to fighting in Afghanistan do much more than parade? It looks like the “Long-Term Vision” of “environmentally friendly” wars that “not necessarily involve fighting battles” is already here.
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