France urges the EU to swiftly set up military mobility corridors and a central authority to coordinate rapid troop and equipment movements eastward.
Currently, it can at times take more than 10 days for France to receive the necessary permits from other member states to move military personnel or equipment through, despite a European target of five days maximum, the general said.
"The war of aggression being waged by Russia on European territory, on Ukrainian territory, makes it likely I would say, that our forces will be heavily engaged on European territory on our continent,"
Air Force Brigadier General Fabrice Feola, who commands the French military's Operations and Transport Support Centre, told reporters on Thursday morning.
France provides military supplies to Kyiv, trains Ukrainian soldiers in Poland as part of the bloc's EUMAM mission, and commands a multinational NATO unit in Romania.
Only regular convoy types with restrictions on the quantity of troops, vehicles, and equipment type are covered by bilateral agreements with other member nations that shorten this time.
In order to streamline processes and ease travel within the union, the European Commission is anticipated to unveil a package on military mobility around the middle of November.
Dematerializing some customs paperwork and expediting the process of obtaining licenses to cross borders are both "achievable and within reach" according to Feola.
However, the EU must also quickly identify transportation corridors whose roads, tunnels, bridges, and railroads can support military equipment's weight, width, and height restrictions.
Over the summer, member states, NATO representatives, European Commissioner for Defense and Space Andrius Kubilius, and Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas held talks on corridors.
There are now four such corridors in place, and 500 priority projects have been identified, ranging from building railway sidings to enlarging tunnels and strengthening bridges.
But Feola also said "it is extremely important to have a unifying authority to coordinate all the efforts being made to ensure that everything fits together from one country to another".
"There should be no discontinuity between corridors or between routes. Efforts should be optimised, I would say, to ensure continuity,"
he added.
EU governments also need to lay the groundwork to ensure ministries start working together and communicating so that in the event of a conflict, there is no "internal competition" to move goods around. France, he said, has reactivated an interministerial logistics coordination unit to that effect.
"I am thinking in particular of our American ally who, in the event of NATO plans being activated, would land en masse on the Atlantic coast and would need to cross our country to reach positions further east. So this notion of competition inevitably leads us to coordinate at national level in order to make the best possible use of the resources available to us,"
he said.
New laws that make it easier to authorize personnel carriages that can be included in freight trains were already adopted by the European Commission in April.
The French military hired 150 foreign rail excursions in 2024, a significant increase from the "handful - less than five a year" that were chartered before to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to Feola, who stated that trains are particularly relevant in the European context.
The primary obstacle to international mobility for armed forces, aside from the requirement to define transport routes, is that the great majority of equipment transit is carried out with the assistance of private sector resources.
In France, outside resources were used for 90% of the military's freight transportation last year. Regarding trains, the French military and the SNCF, the country's railway industry, currently collaborate closely.
What funding sources can fast-track mobility projects?
These offer substantial financial support for infrastructure projects that enable the movement of people and goods for military and civilian purposes, and in particular, improvements to roads, rail, bridges, and tunnels to facilitate the movement of troops and equipment.
While its focus is primarily on defense capability development and technology advancement, the EDF has the flexibility to provide funding for mobility-related projects that enhance interoperability with strategic military infrastructure across NATO member states.
This next legislative proposal will likely include specialized funding and procedures to expedite military mobility corridor upgrades, as well as to facilitate cross-border military movement.