Name: What's behind the EU plans for a military rapid response system? | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T16:51:04.000Z
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In response to the growing security threat from Russia, the European Commission is set to propose an emergency system to speed up the cross border movement of troops and equipment.

Military operators would be given priority access to railways and roads during a crisis and be allowed to cut through red tape.

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As DW's Terry Schultz reports from Brussels, this would allow a much faster reaction than is currently possible.

Fears that Russia may strike beyond Ukraine suggest ever shorter timelines.

Putin can be ready to test article during the next two or four years before 2030.

What hasn't changed quickly is the ability to ensure NATO would be there to fight back.

Backup forces and firepower from across the alliance trying to get to a crisis spot would face lots of problems, hundreds of them identified by the European Commission itself as it launches the latest multi billion euro plan to change that.

The White paper identified over 500 hotspot projects to military mobility.

That needs to be also addressed urgently.

Our objective is that by the end 2027 we will have an EU wide military mobility area.

That's high ambition based on today's situation, where for decades too few efforts have been made to adapt roads and bridges for heavy military vehicles.

While it can take up to 60 days, for example, for military equipment to get from France to Romania due to bureaucracy and border procedures, analysts note that fixing these sometimes literal roadblocks are are long term expensive projects politicians have simply avoided addressing.

We have the strategies, we have the priorities to enhance military mobility.

But then what is needed in the end is political will.

And what we see, according to my opinion, is that the political will is not where it should be.

army General Ben Hodges commanded American forces in Europe, he ran into such red tape and restrictions trying to carry out multinational exercises with NATO forces.

Once paratroopers were asked to show passports in the middle of a jump.

Hodges coined the term military Schengen Zone to call for harmonized transport plans across alliance territory, something that's still lacking.

We need the same effect that a truckload of apples could go from Poland all the way to Lisbon, Portugal without ever stopping, you know, because they could travel all the way through the Schengen zone.

And I said that's what we need for NATO forces, for military forces to be able to move without stopping.

Some nations have cooperated to set up such corridors.

A group led by the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, a model for the rest of the continent.

Mihaly Kiaja says some improvements could be made immediately, like simply having conversations between ministries, armed forces, national and local authorities and the private sector.

These actors don't really cooperate together to enhance military mobility.

In some cases they don't even speak to each other.

Says when they do, they need to understand just what's at stake.

There's just still too many people don't believe that Russia would actually really attack.

They are, they are conducting operations against us now.

And while NATO warns adversaries it's ready to fight tonight, many of the projects which would ensure it could keep up that battle should have been started yesterday.

And Terry Schultz, who filed that report, joins me now.

Terry, you ended it there should have been started yesterday.

That leads me to perhaps the most obvious question of these problems, as you, you know, are as bad as you explain in your report there, why hasn't anything been done about it until now?

Well, it wouldn't be fair, Rebecca, to say that nothing has been done because they've been talked about for years and decades.

And there have been some projects, in fact, one very successful one, as I mentioned there in my piece, has been a corporate corridor, sort of a mini military Schengen zone reaching from the Netherlands over to Poland, where these countries, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, have really reduced their red tape and looked at every infrastructure problem that might exist and they've worked together on eliminating them.

Now just a few days ago, more countries have signed on to that deal, eight countries now, including Belgium and Luxembourg and stretching over to Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

So these kind of things are successful on a small scale.

Now the European Union is saying and will say when it presents this plan later today that it wants this to be EU wide by 2027.

Now everyone who's traveled inside the EU Schengen zone can imagine how that would work.

We barely know when we're crossing borders.

We're not having to change trains like we had to in the old days.

So this is very much what they would like to to happen also for military forces when they have to cross borders.

But rules and regulations, bureaucracy, and this is nothing new.

It's always a problem, particularly in the eu.

But surely all of that would likely go out the window in a real crisis.

You just reported on it a few minutes ago.

And you're probably talking about situations that are below the level of NATO's Article 5, where all the countries would have to come to the defense, you're talking about scale war, where certainly things would change and troops would be allowed to move quickly when it comes to bureaucracy.

But you can't change the width of tunnels overnight.

You can't make sure that those bridges could carry these heavy tanks overnight.

And that's what would be necessary to fight at the strength that NATO believes would be necessary if Russia were to really come across the border.

Now, we shouldn't be trying to, to scare people here.

No one thinks a threat like that is imminent.

But the whole deterrence policy is that you make sure you could defend your territory if it did happen.

And that couldn't, simply couldn't happen at the level it needs to right now.

You mentioned the time it will take replacing tunnels, reinforcing bridges, not being able to be done overnight and certainly not being able to be done without any money.

What is the European Commission going to propose financially to get these upgrades started?

The time is one thing, the money is another thing.

And if we look back at the last seven year budget, where also military mobility was said to be a priority, they only granted 1.7 billion euros over seven years.

Hardly anything when you look at the 27 member states and the 95 hotspots they identified at that point.

So later today, as, as I've seen in the paper that the Commission will present, these 500 hotspots are going to get a proposal of just over 17 billion.

Now that's still not a lot when you look at what needs to be done, how expensive it is to undertake these huge infrastructure projects that will last over many, many years.

But it is a tenfold increase over the last seven year budget.

We don't know what that will look like once the budget is agreed.

Those negotiations are just at an early stage.

But it shows that at least the Commission is willing to put more money toward seeding these projects that then will have to be largely funded by member states themselves.

I wonder, is there a danger in talking about this so publicly because then adversaries such as Russia or, you know, others may know, know about this, that this is a huge problem in Europe.

Well, these 500 hotspots are not being publicized.

We don't know exactly what they are according to the Commission, but

you can read numerous reports that point out where a lot of the problems are and you can see it in the news.

And I think everyone presumes Russia also knows where the biggest problems are.

But what Ben Hodges has said is that if you don't talk about if you don't share with your publics what a big concern this is, they won't support them politically.

And that's also part of this process that's also necessary.

So I think they've decided that this is the right balance now.

DW Terry Schultz, thanks very much for your reporting.

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What's behind the EU plans for a military rapid response system? | DW News

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