Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos n.º 13 - Año: 2019 - Págs.: 243 a 274 251 Bernardo González-Lázaro Sueiras Defense cooperation between Portugal… (Parent, 2015, 4). This initiative had a very limited result, as did the development of capabilities under the control of the EDA. For its part, NATO proposed the equiva-lent SD (Pertusot, 2015, 27), oriented towards priority capabilities for the Alliance, but which ended up being limited to capabilities of little relevance: logistical, training and non-cinetic. In both cases, cooperation was limited to matters that were not critical to the MS (Pertusot, 2015, 20), mainly in the field of training, which neither compro-mised sovereignty, nor implied specialization. Secretary of State Robert Gates’ speech in June of 2011 (Traynor, 2011, 10 June) and the announcement that the US would only provide 50 percent of the capabilities of the Alliance marked the beginning of a new era for defense in Europe in terms of re-sponsibilities (Möling, 2015, 5). The crises in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine were clear indicators of the level of dependence of the EU with respect to the US, as well as of the growing loss of capabilities of its defense industry (Shanker and Erlangerjune, 2011, 10 June). It was impossible to ignore this imperative any longer, taking into account that the EU had lost 20 percent of its defense capabilities since 2008 (EDA, 2018), and was paying very large amounts for redundancies and uncoordinated national acquisition processes. The continual reduction in defense expenditures had had as a consequence a European structural disarmament, with a numerical reduction of 500,000 soldiers in the EU during the period 2006-2012 (Pertusot, 2015, 25). On the other hand, the cutbacks were aggravated by the demands of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance of the Economic and Monetary Union (TECG)15 which called for a reduc-tion in public debt to below 60 percent and a deficit lower than 3 percent. The European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) published a report in 2013 (Rogers and Gili, 2013, 9-15) in which it identified several problems that European defense faced: reduction in defense budgets in most of the MS; inefficient invest-ment; inadequate military capabilities; and equipment with insufficiently advanced technology. Furthermore, there was a conflict of opinion between the planning of the forces and the management of the operations; cooperation in defense, industry and technology was limited and a strategic culture that specified when, where and how the EU should use force was lacking, thus defining the real capabilities to be developed (Nissen, 2015, 11). The question of national interests and divergent strategic cultures, fear of the specialization that the P&S and SD imply, and, in short, sovereignty and trust emerged as key limiting elements. A new impetus to European cooperation in defense The European Council reopened the debate about common defense in December of 201316, with the aim of examining defense cooperation in order to support a credible 15 Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, signed in Brussels on 2 March, 2012. 16 Conclusions of the European Council 19/20 December, 2013, held in Brussels on 20 December 2013. EUCO 217/13.
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