OPINIONWE ALL knew the end of the oil age was approaching. That knowledge did little to prepare us for the pain of rising petrol and gas prices. The unfortunate residents of the Centaur Street apartments in Carlow understood that climate change affects weather patterns - an understanding transformed by the River Barrow pouring into their homes in mid-August.
We are daily confronted with evidence that our planet's conflict resolution, defence, peace and security systems fail to meet our needs - but most of us have fortunately not had to experience the pain of that failure.
Our world resembles some remote district where 30 villages have 10 designated fire buckets each. Some of the bigger villages have pumps, and others have mismatched hoses. On paper it all adds up to a reasonable fire-fighting capacity, but every time a blaze breaks out the systems inadequacies are tragically revealed. At best, 300 buckets are still no replacement for a fire engine.
Some from the bigger villages claim their size permits them to impose terms in any discussions about co-operation. This leads to a natural reaction from some in the smaller villages who view all talk of co-operation as a threat. This analogy, like most, only stretches so far but it serves to illustrate both the shortcomings of the systems we have inherited and our need to replace them with something new.
We must start from where we are, individual nation states with their own foreign and security policies. Each is influenced by its location, its history and its size. All suffer from an inertia-driven default mode of reproducing what they have.
Defence questions have never been central during Ireland's 87 years of independent existence. We have never equipped our defence forces to deter an external threat because our size and location rendered such threats unlikely, or at least remote. Our fire buckets are designed primarily for internal security, and to occasionally form part of an international chain.
The majority of small European nations have a different experience. They were invaded and conquered by larger powers during the second World War. Belgian, Danish, Dutch, or Norwegian neutrality offered them no protection.
Understandably, they expanded their defence forces after 1945 and, in the face of a perceived Soviet threat, banded together in Nato. This history leaves them with armed forces designed to resist a vanished threat and consequently poorly adapted to current needs - forces that are not only largely pointless today, but expensive to the point of being unsustainable.
France and the UK find themselves in an even worse situation as something between 20 and 25 per cent of their defence spending goes on nuclear forces which are rather more status symbols than effective weapons. Commitment to maintaining those symbols means that their conventional forces must be regularly starved of vital resources and equipment.
The RAF is taking delivery of 144 Eurofighter jets - a combat aircraft designed for the cold war. Contracts have been signed to build replacement aircraft carriers for the navy, although where the funding for the F-35 fighters destined to operate from their decks is coming from remains a mystery. Their army meantime lacks the helicopters and mine-resistant light armoured vehicles its troops so desperately need, while heavy Challenger tanks remain ready to face long-vanished Soviet units in Germany.
France has just launched a series of swingeing defence cuts, closing garrisons in Northern France and withdrawing forces from Africa. It continues to buy its high-performance Rafale combat aircraft while many of its ageing army helicopters remain unserviceable. We live in a world where classic inter-state wars are less frequent, less likely and, increasingly, less possible. The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq may, hopefully, be the last folly of its kind.
Russian actions in Georgia offer positive and negative examples of this reality. Moscow deployed overwhelming force but halted less than 60km from the Georgian capital for political rather than military reasons. No EU member has the capacity to wage an aggressive war.
In times of crisis we turn towards our national military forces as they are the only professional and deployable instruments at our disposal. There are no international corps, and most nations lack deployable civilian security, medical, engineering and logistics bodies. Yet most nations persist in trying to equip and maintain forces designed to fight the wars of yesteryear, therefore preventing the transfer of limited resources towards more relevant priorities.
Our world needs flexible and modular forces, and conflict- resolution institutions. Armed forces require fewer tanks and supersonic interceptors, but more helicopters, transport aircraft and robustly protected vehicles. We need the ability to quickly assemble teams where the blend of medical, engineering, sanitary, security and judicial personnel can be decided depending on the challenge - be it a natural disaster, a civil conflict, or a disintegrating state. Starting from where we find ourselves, such teams will have to be built around military structures. They will have to be multinational, and developed through existing political frameworks.
EU members no longer threaten each other, and from that painfully constructed reality can collectively offer the planet something new - something born of a joint approach between those who either never had, or who can no longer afford, sophisticated militaries, and those who have yet to come to terms with that reality.
Fierce opposition from traditional military power advocates and defenders of classic neutrality only lends credence to such an approach.