Interview

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Georg NACHTSHEIM
Chief of Staff of the HQ Eurocorps

Q: EUROCORPS celebrates 15 years of its existence this year. What is your assessment, looking back at these years ?

R: The Eurocorps is a success story, no question! What started as common German and French initiative to establish an army corps for the conventional defence of Western Europe, has meanwhile become a multinational major unit that can be employed for all tasks presenting themselves in the conflicts we are facing today and a unit that that is available both to NATO and the European Union. Five European states form the core of this unit, and Poland, as a country of the former Eastern Bloc, is about to join us soon. In addition, we have personnel from other European countries in our Headquarters Staff, who are involved in all our work, whether in day-to-day duty, during exercises or when we deploy for operational missions – and we do not encounter any problems at all in this truly multinational work. Today ten nations are represented here, and soon it will be even more. This fact alone proves that we are successful – and we are proud of this success.

Q: What does the organisation of the Headquarters in Strasbourg look like ?

R: At first glance, we are not different from comparable military headquarters, looking at our structure and distribution of tasks: we have a commander, a deputy commander, there are branches in charge of personnel, training and exercises, operations planning, logistics and so on. There are elements, however, that make us unique: every two years important tasks are in turn taken over by another nation, when the posts of the commander and his deputy, of the Chief of Staff and a number of other key posts are newly manned by another nation. This is to ensure that all nations involved can identify with the EUROCORPS, can see their contribution and importance and can have an influence by manning key positions. We are all in an equal position, as far as this is concerned! The majority of the posts and tasks in the Headquarters, however, are assigned to specific nations according to a jointly agreed distribution key. This is a principle that guarantees continuity and a high degree of professionalism. Furththermore, there are synergies. To sum it up: what makes us really special is the multinationality and synergy in our daily work. In this respect one can say that we can serve as a model for future European armed forces.

Q: What is your specific function in the Headquarters ?

R: I am Chief of Staff in our Headquarters with its currently more than a thousand soldiers and civilian employees. This means, my responsibility is to ensure that the Staff is able to do its work and meets the objectives laid down by our Commander. To this end, I issue tasks, coordinate and monitor the Staff's work. Currently, a Belgian and a Spanish general support me in this function, in future they will be complemented by a Polish general. In an operation, this Staff must be able to exercise command and control over up to 60,000 soldiers. It takes constant preparations to able to perform this task. Perhaps one can compare my function to that of a manager in a business enterprise who is responsible to ensure for the owner that the business operations are carried out in a successful way.

Q: Can you tell us something about the current relations between the EU and the Eurocorps ?

R: This is a field in which much progress has been made during the last few months, and the success story is going on here! Just to mention one important point: this summer, the European Parliament voted in favour of declaring our Headquarters a military headquarters available to the European Union. We could thus form the core of a future European Army. At the same time, however, we form an interface to NATO. We are the headquarters that our nations and Europe – and let me stress: not a single nation alone – can make available to NATO. Thus, we will equally remain major army unit that can be employed by NATO for missions to ensure peace or to respond to humanitarian disaster situations. We are compatible in both directions!
After our success story has so far always featured operations as Rapid Reaction Corps in a NATO framework, we have started this year to widen the scope of our exercise and training activities and our competences and potential scenarios by including the specific aspects that would present themselves in an EU-led operation. In 2010 we will then be available to NATO again, being in stand-by to form part of the NATO Response Force.

Q: What will be the next Eurocorps missions ?

R: I cannot answer you this question. Such missions are assigned to us by the politicians as the result of negotiations that take place within the respective boards and councils and on the basis of decisions taken by the national parliaments. We can offer good pre-requisites in the fields of equipment and personnel, we have the experience from participation in three missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan, we are certified as a High-Readiness Force and a NATO Response Force headquarters, and we play, so-to-speak in the Champions League, together with only six other comparable headquarters within NATO. And none of the other headquarters is as multinational, as integrated and as visibly European as we are. We are not better than others, but we are something unique!

At the moment, there are no deployment operations planned for us. Next year, however, we will start preparing for our next stand-by phase as part of NRF, that is to say of a joint force package covering between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers altogether.
Then we will be available again to NATO for the entire spectrum of military tasks of crisis and conflict management.