| European Union Military Staff | |
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| Seat | Brussels, Belgium |
| Website | Official website |
The European Union Military Staff (EUMS) is a department of the European Union (EU), responsible for supervising operations within the realm of the Common Security and Defence Policy. It is directly attached to the private office of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, currently Catherine Ashton, and is formally part of the European External Action Service.
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In addition to providing strategic advice to the High Representative, the EUMS reports to the European Union Military Committee (EUMC), an intergovernmental Council body made up of the Chiefs of Defence. Its main task is to perform "early warning, situation assessment and strategic planning for Petersberg tasks" and to implement CSDP missions (2001/80/CFSP, annex article 2) such as EUFOR Althea and the other European Union Force missions in Chad/CAR and the DR Congo. The EUMS current consists of 200+ military and civilian personnel.
The EUMS is located in the Kortenberg building, a short distance from the Berlaymont building, at Avenue de Kortenberg 150, B-1040 Brussels. Nearby is the Belgian Royal Military Academy building.
EUMS is headed by a Director General, currently Lieutenant General Ton van Osch, who was previously the military representative of the Netherlands to both the EU and NATO.[1] He succeeded Lieutenant General David Leakey (2007-2010), who succeeded FR Lieutenant General Jean-Paul Perruche (2004-2007).
The EUMS does not directly control the EU military missions. In order to conduct an EU military crisis management operation, an Operational Headquarters (OHQ) is nominated by the appropriate EU Council decision. The OHQ directs the Force Headquarters or FHQ, also provided by a member country, which carries out the operation on the ground. If an EU operation is planned and conducted with recourse to NATO assets and capabilities, the OHQ is automatically the NATO Allied Command Operations (ACO), formerly known as SHAPE, located in Mons, Belgium. In other cases, five national operational headquarters have been made available for use by the Union to fulfil the OHQ role. The French CPCO - Centre de Planification et de Conduite des Opérations - is situated at the à l'État major des Armées, 231 boulevard St Germain, in Paris. Near Paris also is the French Mont Valérien command-and-control facility, where a French declared OHQ for EU operations is located. (It is not clear if the French Mont Valerien facility has a national designation). The others are the British PJHQ at the Northwood Headquarters northwest of London, Germany's Armed Forces Operational Command near Potsdam, Centocelle in Rome and Larissa. The selected OHQ runs the operation at the strategic level. For example, Operation Artemis used Mont Valérien as its OHQ and EUFOR's DR Congo operation used Potsdam.[2] The second option is to use NATO facilities, under 'Berlin plus' arrangements, as was the case for mounting EUFOR Althea, for which SHAPE was used.[3]
From 1 January 2007, as a third option, the European Union Operations Centre also began work in Brussels. It can command an operation of limited size of mixed military and civilian character, or, alternatively, a rapid reaction force of about 2000 troops (e.g. a battlegroup).
The Military Staff has supervised a number of deployments since its establishment. The term 'EUFOR' or 'European Union Force' has been used to describe a number of military deployments, and has been used four times so far: in the F.Y.R.O.M. from March 2003 to December 2003 as EUFOR Concordia, in Bosnia from 2004 as EUFOR Althea, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006, and in Chad and the Central African Republic since 2007. EUFOR is a temporary military deployment, not a permanent military force, and should not be confused with the Eurocorps, Eurofor or the Helsinki Headline Goal Force Catalogue, sometime misleadingly known as the 'European Rapid Reaction Force'. The name 'EUFOR' probably was patterned in imitation of NATO's IFOR, SFOR, and KFOR.
EUFOR Althea is a military deployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina to oversee the military implementation of the Dayton Agreement. It is the successor to SFOR and IFOR. The transition from SFOR to EUFOR was largely a change of name and commanders: 80% of the troops remained in place.[4] It replaced the NATO-led SFOR on 2 December 2004.
EUFOR also refers to the EU mission under the auspices and in the framework of MINURCAT in Chad and the Central African Republic, from late 2007 onwards.[5]
The acronym EUFOR was also used for a short deployment in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On 25 April 2006, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1671 (2006), authorising the temporary deployment of an EU force to support the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) during the period encompassing the elections in the DR Congo, which began on 30 July.
The Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb has announced that the EU is prepared for a EUFOR Libya, and is waiting for a request from the United Nations Security Council.[6] EU member states Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK are already committed to the enforcement of the UN resolution.