I read this story and then the other army story that the UK will block any EU army. (quite how we will do that I am not sure as it is unlikely the Eu will take any notice of us)
Is there any harm in an EU army- which would not be instead of NATO but would make NATO potentially more effective as it would reduce membership to manageable size and with US presidents saying Europe needs to stand on its own two feet a much larger integrated force would be betetr at replacing to whatever degree gaps left by withdrawl of US forces and be more of a counterweight to the US domination of NTO as by far and away the largest memeber ?
To me it seems a good idea as no EU state can really afford a proper army any more except perhaps France which has its own accounting system so an Eu army would over time see huge savings in equipment and diversity in manning -no need for Skiing Royal marines as the Scandis and Eastern europeans would do that . I would have thought UK would do pretty well in terms of key jobs as we are more experienced than most other EU armies and probably reasonably well regarded because of our history. Our squaddies have more actual combat than most and would benefit from the better weapons and kit it seems other armies usually have even if we have better-ie more experience soldiers (an example of this is the recent BBC documentary about Afghanistan and Helmland province. A much smaller Uk unit had replace 100 Danes holding a small village against the aliban. Our guys looked very competent and did well but had two peashooter machine guns and a couple of WW2 era mortars but the Danes had 6 fifty cal brownings plus a lot of rockets .
So overall I would think we would do well out of an EU army so why the immediate and vehement UK government opposition?