Military Resources. Equipment, services and facilities available from military sources on HN air stations, army bases or naval installations will be provided free of charge where possible.
Military Resources. Equipment, services and facilities available from military sources will be provided free of charge, subject to reimbursement of incremental costs only.
Military Resources. One of the biggest challenges for the ESDP was to find good resources so it could perform effectively and ensure international security. This was one of the main objectives who were set during the establishment of the ESDP in 1999. During the first ten years, the ESDP has suffered from several shortcomings in quantity as well as quality of available resources. This section analyses the civil, military and financial resources available to the ESDP (Xxxxx, 2009). The European Union does not own their own army of does not possess a defence budget. Each Member State of the European Union has their own army and has full sovereignty over their armed forces. Member States can choose for their own if they want to contribute to ESDP operations (Xxxxxxxxxxx, 2017). How much money each Member State should spend on defence, is up to the Member States themselves to decide and not the EU institutions. In total, the Member States spend over €200 billion on defence collectively which should be enough to cover all Europe‘s defence needs. Despite this, Europeans do not have enough soldiers with the necessary skills for international peacekeeping operations. Some Member States did not even reform their armed forces after the Cold War into a participating army. Apart from this, EU armies also need more useful military equipment. For example, for the peacekeeping operation in Eastern Xxxx, it took six months for the EU governments to find good equipment, after these six months, they were only in the possession of sixteen helicopters and ten short-range transport planes (Xxxxx, 2009). It can be said that the European defence budgets have fallen as a percentage of GDP in the last twelve years. According to the European Defence Agengy (EDA), the EU average for defence spending as a proportion of GDP fell from 1.81 percent in 2005 to 1.69 percent in 2007. On top of that, the cost of defence equipment is rising every year by six to eight percent which puts EU military establishments under pressure. And no one country is wealthy enough in this domain to afford to buy a full range of equipment. However, the EU governments are therefore discussing about several defence equipment programmes to counter this problem (Tardy, 2009). IJLRET Total expenditure €156.2 Bn €162.9 Bn 209.7 Bn + 29% Expenditure/GDP 2.1% 2.1% 1.7% +19% Budget/GDP 1.7% 1.8% 1.4% -22% Total Active Military 1.759.568 2.478.608 2.013.990 -19% Army 1.125.718 1.516.378 996.234 34% Navy 281.450 327.400 222.313 -32% Air Fo...
