Abstract
Spain’s economic problems are beginning to impact on its ability to play
a role on the world stage.
Defence spending is to fall by 4% this year,
although the Spanish government says it will maintain
spending on major
procurement projects. Spanish forces were withdrawn from Kosovo and Chad
earlier
this year. An additional deployment of 600 troops to Afghanistan
will only be for a few months to cover
the August elections in the central
Asian country.
The economic downturn led to a surge in applications to
join the Spanish military in 2008, totalling some
78,575. The aim now is
to achieve a ceiling of 86,000 professional military personnel. Major
recruitment
drives have been launched to attract female recruits and
citizens of Spanish-speaking Latin American
countries. Reservists have
also been offered full-time contracts to rejoin the service for limited
periods. In
February 2009 the Spanish Ministry of Defence announced it
would change military laws to allow
transsexuals to serve in the
country’s armed forces after a potential recruit took court action
against the
ministry. Spanish military personnel deployed in Afghanistan
were banned from logging on to ‘sports’
websites in April 2009
because they were overloading military communications satellite links.
The
flagship programme of Spain’s defence industry, the A400M military
transport aircraft has entered a
period of crisis after a key contractual
milestone to fly the first prototype was missed on April 1 2009.
The
customer nations are now reconsidering their options and have given EADS until
July to come up
with new proposals to move the troubled programme forward.
The A400M is being assembled in Seville.
It was ordered in 2003 by
Germany, Britain, Spain, Turkey, Belgium and Luxembourg to replace their
military transport fleets and to support the increasingly global nature of
operations. Turkey and Spain
together account for 25% of the project, with
Spain ordering 27 planes.
Spain’s participation in the Eurofighter
Typhoon project took a major step forward in April and May
when partner
nations agreed, subject to successful contract negotiations, to purchase
Tranche 3 of the
European combat aircraft. The country’s army is
also expected to benefit from the expected launch of
competition to build
a next generation of 8 x 8 armoured fighting vehicles to replace the existing
fleet,
which has been found to be vulnerable to insurgent IEDs in Lebanon
and Afghanistan.
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