CBRN defence in Europe: NATO and EU efforts

The chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threat refuses to disappear. Continued examples of actual and alleged uses of chemical weapons around the world show that the spectre of chemical warfare is not relegated to history. Nuclear weapons still exist, and the prospect of accidents and incidents involving nuclear power plants and radioactive materials is of concern to Europe’s leaders, both military and civil. Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU) follow the CBRN threat and pursue various efforts and initiatives of relevance to protecting against CBRN threats.

NATO and CBRN

NATO is, first and foremost, a collective defence organisation designed to protect its members against external attack. An attack on one member state is an attack on all member states. Yet NATO has also grown over the decades into a practical defence-oriented international organisation with many other aspects. It has evolved offices and agencies to help it operate in both war and peace.

At the core of NATO collective defence, not just in CBRN defence but in every other aspect of collective defence, are joint exercises. The idea behind NATO is that the members will fight together to defend each other, and exercises are a way to train as you might fight. This holds true in both broader defence exercises and in specific CBRN defence. A casual examination of training exercises in recent years shows rather more joint exercises with a CBRN emphasis than may have been the usual in previous decades. Perhaps this is a reflection of the times in which we live rather than mere coincidence.

One recent example of a NATO CBRN exercise was the ‘Toxic Trip 23’ exercise, at Koksijde Air Base in Belgium in September 2023. This exercise involved air force units responding to simulated CBRN attack, with an emphasis on decontamination and getting the air base back into operation. About 500 participants from 18 NATO countries participated. Another example occurred in July 2023, at Canadian Forces Base Suffield, in Alberta, Canada. Members of 14 different NATO countries participated in ‘Precise Response 23’, focusing on standardising decontamination procedures between the various participating countries. This location was particularly useful in that Suffield is one of the few places in NATO that can safely and legally use live chemical warfare agents in small quantities for training exercises.

In terms of CBRN defence, aside from exercises, one of the most significant aspects of NATO is also, to some minds, the dullest. NATO spends a lot of money on standardisation and interoperability across every aspect of military operations. Most aspects of military CBRN defence are heavily covered by NATO standardisation agreements (STANAGs) and related documents, such as ‘Allied Engineering Publications’ (AEPs). For example, warning and reporting of chemical attacks is in an agreed message format that is readable by every CBRN officer across the alliance. Decontamination and collective protection follow STANAGs. These documents are so valued that they are often used by countries outside NATO. Indeed, rapid integration of Finland and Sweden into NATO has been facilitated by the fact that those two countries have had decades to look at STANAGS and other documents and have spent years applying them. NATO standardisation has been both a boost to defensive capability and a boon for industry, in that manufacturers can meet the standards of many countries simultaneously. The CBRN industry could not be reasonably expected to make different protective mask filters with different screw-threads for Slovenia, Spain, and Estonia.

Standardisation lays the groundwork for interoperability, which, in turn, gives scope for various kinds of sharing and pooling of resources and capability. NATO provides a great forum for pooling of specialist effort and capability in CBRN defence. Most NATO militaries are in the small to medium size range, and not every member state has the depth, either in knowledge or in resources, to replicate the full spectrum of CBRN defence capability that the larger states can field.

One such effort pools knowledge and experience. NATO operates a Joint CBRN Defence Centre of Excellence, in Vyškov, Czechia. Now in its 17th year, the Centre is staffed by military and civil employees from 14 different NATO countries. The Centre, habitually commanded by a Czech officer, plays a number of important roles. Their training and exercise department coordinates a wide variety of activities to promote CBRN defence across the alliance and its various partners. It is also offering five different CBRN courses in 2023. An operational support department provides valuable technical ‘reach-back’ assistance that puts operational units in touch with high-quality technical experts. The modelling and simulation section provides useful capabilities that help both training and contingency operations.

As well as pooling expertise, NATO actually pools deployable specialist capability. Since its establishment in 2003, over 20 NATO members (and occasional non-NATO members) have contributed troops to a Combined Joint CBRN Defence Task Force. The Task Force consists of a smaller, agile, Joint Assessment Team and a larger CBRN Defence battalion. Nominally hosted in Czechia, various NATO members contribute components to the battalion on rotation, which are usually based in their home country. They come together for training and exercises. The battalion somewhat taxes the definition of ‘rapid’, as it takes from 2 to 20 days to deploy, depending on the component, unless it is placed on alert. Yet many such NATO capacities are based on some assumptions about advanced warning and gradual deterioration of the European security situation. Typically, eight or so member states comprise the Task Force during a normal rotation.

Other NATO efforts get less publicity than the Centre and Battalion but are nonetheless significant. Three CBRN collaborative projects within the NATO framework have been set up among some subsets of NATO members. The Network of CBRN Defence Facilities has been set up to allow greater coordination and sharing between CBRN defence institutions in Belgium, Greece, Italy and Spain. A CBRN Protection Equipment collaborative framework involves Albania, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It aims to jointly procure individual and collective protection equipment. A similar NATO framework in CBRN Detection and Identification has been set up involving Albania, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Although the efforts sometime pale in comparison to the lavish science and technology budgets of the European Union, NATO has funded a variety of research and development projects in the CBRN arena through mechanisms such as the Science for Peace and Security (SPS) programme. NATO projects tend to be smaller than large, multi-year, multilateral EU projects, but they are often also more closely focused on specific CBRN technology. Unlike EU projects, these projects can more easily involve partners from the USA. One example is the ‘Determination of Exposed Dose and Radioactive Source Identity in Radiological Emergency’, led by a consortium based in Turkey.

The overlap between the EU and NATO grew with the addition of Sweden and Finland as partner states. Both Sweden and Finland bring valuable capabilities to NATO in the CBRN sphere. Sweden and Finland have excellent national CBRN laboratories of world renown – FOI (Sweden) and VERIFIN (Finland). The defence forces of both nations do reasonably well in CBRN defence. Even before NATO membership, Finland’s Deployable CBRN laboratory and its Rapid Deployment Force-CBRN have participated in various NATO efforts. Importantly, both nations have significant industrial players (including many SMEs with useful technical innovations) and technical expertise (in industry, government, and academia) in various aspects of CBRN. It remains to be seen how NATO will benefit in the longer term in CBRN defence as the result of Swedish and Finnish accession, but it can only be in the positive direction.

The European Union

Although NATO is older and explicitly defence and security-oriented, the European Union (EU) is also active in many aspects of CBRN defence and security. As can be expected, these efforts tend more towards protection of the civil population rather than military CBRN defence, although there is certainly crossover in this area. Numerous EU CBRN efforts of varying types and sizes exist across the continent.

The EU spends lavishly on research and development in science and technology. There are many methods by which the European Commission does this, but the most prominent is the Horizon Europe programme. Horizon Europe spends money across practically every scientific and technical field, but some Horizon Europe projects fall either directly or peripherally in the CBRN protection and response space. Horizon Europe is the follow-on to its predecessors such as Horizon 2020 and Framework Provision 7, which also had numerous CBRN projects. By design, Horizon projects last for years and involve consortia of members from multiple EU member states. A number of non-EU members have various types of associated status that allow them to participate.

Current and former Horizon projects relevant in this space are too numerous to list in their entirety, but some examples illustrate the type of work currently ongoing. CHIMERA is a three-year EUR 5.7 million project coordinated out of Poland with 11 consortium members (including two non-EU entities based in Norway and Japan). It seeks to improve detection, command and control, and hazard modelling in urban areas in the event of a chemical or radiological incident. The iFlows project is coordinated by an Austrian research institute and has 13 members, a three-year timeline, and a EUR 4 million budget. It seeks to improve technology for detection of hazardous goods in parcels, such as postal shipments. This is a good example of a Horizon project that is not explicitly labelled as ‘CBRN’ but has the potential of impacts in the CBRN response space. Another such example is SHIELD4CROWD, which looks at vulnerability of crowds and public spaces to a variety of hazards, including CBRN incidents.

Beyond Horizon Europe, there are other EU efforts with impact CBRN. There is something called the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. In purely financial terms, one of the largest expenditures on CBRN response in Europe is the CBRN component of the RescEU project, which is hosted in Finland. RescEU is a project to stockpile emergency supplies for a variety of contingencies, such as wildfires, medical crises, and natural disasters. The EU decided that a similar stockpile of CBRN protection and response equipment is necessary. The total budget for the CBRN RescEU stockpile is massive, EUR 242 million over several financial years, making it one of the larger CBRN investments in recent history. This stockpile in Finland is deployable to other EU states or even elsewhere as needed. As part of the effort, Finland is training 66 deployable instructors who can, if needed, deploy with the equipment to provide training and expertise on how to use the stockpile’s various detection, treatment, and protection components.

Another long-running effort by the European Commission has been the EU CBRN Centres of Excellence (CBRN CoE). This is an outward looking effort, led by the EU’s Service for Foreign Policy Instruments. CBRN CoE seeks to support other parts of the world in various aspects of CBRN security. It is funded by the EU’s Director General for International Cooperation and Development as a foreign aid activity. CBRN CoE has worked through eight regional offices around the world and has implemented assistance projects in 64 different countries. Some recent examples include a major CBRN training exercise in Tanzania in March of this year and a four-year, 10-country effort in Southeast Asia to improve CBRN medical emergency preparedness. There have been some critiques of the CoE over the years that their work has been rudimentary. However, when one looks at some of the places where this work has been undertaken, the recipient countries have needed assistance at the rudimentary level and giving such assistance is a necessity, not a half-measure.

In some circles, it is almost customary to overlook the European Defence Agency (EDA) as some sort of afterthought or even poor relation to NATO. However, EDA has funded a variety of work in CBRN defence over the years. EDA has run a variety of multi-year programmes to invest money in various aspects of CBRN science and technology. The EDA Joint Investment Programme CBRN started in earnest in 2012 and has spent money on numerous projects, such as stand-off detection and decontamination.

The verdict?

It is both axiomatic and a simplification to say that Europe is complicated continent. A variety of different agencies and funding mechanisms have splashed out serious amounts of money towards various ends. Some, such as the hundreds of millions of Euros filling warehouses in Finland with contingency equipment, have concrete results. Others, such as various research and development efforts, cannot always show an immediate result. This should not always be taken as a criticism as rather a lot of EU and NATO work go towards efforts that are years upstream from products reaching the field. Much work needs to go on at basic stages to result in capabilities emerging five to ten years downstream, and NATO and the EU have been putting money into some of this upstream work.

Perhaps the strongest encouragement should be taken from cooperation and collaboration. Defence of the West will rely upon small, medium, and large countries and their governments, industrial sectors, and militaries working together. There are larger countries with a relative paucity of CBRN readiness and smaller countries that punch well above their weight. Some countries do well industrially in CBRN defence but rather poorly in operational capacity, and vice versa. NATO and the EU work in many ways to level out this state of affairs. Whether it will ever be needed is another question, however. Watch this space.

Dan Kaszeta