But then came the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, followed by a slew of similar terrorist attacks targeting European cities, among them London and Madrid.

In the wake of this new emerging threat emanating from fanatical and extremist minorities within Islam the Europeans found that they needed to reinvent their military and adapt them to the needs of the 21st century.

In the last decade or so, Europeans have become increasingly involved in multinational deployments beyond their countries' borders, according to a just released study published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

The great paradox is that direct military threats to Europe are at their lowest point since the end of World War II. Yet the threat comes from the enemy at the gates of Europe. The geopolitical changes that have taken place since the Cold War ended saw the deployment of European forces in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Africa and Asia.

As the IISS report stipulates, the renewed demands on the armed forces of all European countries – both large and small – for operational deployments, will once again demand that the Europeans reinvent their military, reshape it, and retool it to face the new challenges ahead.

An interesting development highlighted in the IISS report as an "important feature of modern operations" is that almost all intervention forces are now multinational.

This in turn affects operations on the ground as every individual force, reports the IISS study, "is enormously affected by national structures, policies, capabilities and constraints."

In other words, the missions are further complicated as each national component of the multinational force is responsive to different national rationales and narratives on which its deployments are based.

As Rupert Smith, the commander of the multinational force in Bosnia stated in 1995: "Every multinational commander needs to understand that his force is not a whole. Each national contingent will have been sent for different reasons and its government and people will have a different balance as to the risks and rewards.

Thirteen years after Bosnia the same holds true for troops serving in Afghanistan.

Today's warfare differs greatly from that of the Cold War. Lieutenant-General Dirk Bocker, the former German vice chief of defense staff explains that "in the Cold War era you could simply count the numbers of weapons systems of opposing forces and try to equal them – if not numerically then at least in terms of quality."

But with wars being fought asymmetrically, the equations have greatly changed and will continue to evolve as the political situation continues to change.

Assessing Europe's military capabilities as a whole remains impossible, at least for the foreseeable future.

The IISS report goes on to say: "The only way to assess capabilities is nation by nation, since armed forces, budgets, threat assessments and deployment decisions all remain national."

However, as the report points out, both NATO and the European Union have a strong interest in ensuring that their member states are collectively able to meet the demands for missions that each organization undertakes…."

But while the two organizations represent the institutional means to coordinate European development and capabilities, these capabilities will remain essentially national for the foreseeable future.

The IISS paper concludes that a number of problems plague the assessments of NATO and EU capabilities initiatives.

Among the problems cited is the shortage of transparency on force goals, because many important documents remain unpublished or classified. The report laments the difficulty in assessing whether projects in commitments undertaken in any of the initiatives were due to the multinational process or because of national decisions.

In conclusion, the report stipulates that even under the best conditions it would take a long time to correct the capability gaps identified in the report.