BRUSSELS, Dec. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- As the world's largest regional bloc, the European Union (EU) has scored significant achievements in 2004 in building up its independent military capability, a process at the expense of US influence in the transatlantic military alliance.

    The EU's decade-long drive to develop its military muscle to back up its diplomatic weight took visible form as 7,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina replaced their NATO shoulder tags with the EU's blue and gold colors.

    The mission, which started on Dec. 2, marks the 25-nation bloc's largest and most complex operation to date. Now, the EU's military aspirations stretch much further as it seeks to erase its enduring image as an economic giant and a military midget.

    The military operation is seen as a crucial test of the military capabilities of EU nations, as well as their ability to act in unison, as the EU seeks to develop its own coherent military force independent of NATO.

    If successful, it could pave the way for other such missions inareas where NATO has long borne the brunt of responsibility for collective security on the continent, for example in neighboring Kosovo.

    Senior Western officials in Brussels said the deployment is essential to ensure that Bosnia remains peaceful as NATO turns over responsibilities nine years after it first deployed troops to help end the country's civil war.

    The Bosnia mission followed two similar EU peacekeeping operations last year: in Macedonia, where some 1,000 EU troops were involved, and a short-term operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which involved more than 1,500 EU troops.

    Meanwhile, in August, the EU's five-nation Eurocorps, which is made up of troops from Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg, took over from Canada as the lead contingent in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

    Eurocorps, whose headquarters is based in Strasbourg, France, is to be the lead contingent in Afghanistan for a period of six months.

    EU plans are under way to set up 13 battle groups, which are military units that can be deployed rapidly to deal with crisis around the world, by 2007, each with 1,500 troops. Also in the pipeline is a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force for bigger peacekeeping operations.

    "The battle groups are at the forefront of capability improvement, providing the EU with credible, rapidly deployable, coherent force packages capable of stand-alone operations, for theinitial phase of larger operations," said an EU statement.

    Besides, the EU announced in September that it will set up a gendarmerie force which will be operational in 2005.

    The force, to be headquartered in Italy, will be made up of 900 military policemen from France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, and be financed by the contributing countries.

    Although the EU has done a lot in enhancing its independent military role and capabilities, EU leaders have come to realize that Europe has lagged far behind the United States in armaments, intervention capabilities and abilities to cope with crisis.

    A hard fact is that by their command system they can in no way meet the demand for a long-term endeavor of intervention or fighting over a long period of war. Though the EU has a force of over 2 million troops, merely 2 to 3 percent of them can be employed to undertake a peacekeeping task as in Kosovo.

    Observers say that as things now stand in the EU countries, there is still a long way to go for the bloc to build an efficient independent defense and military intervention system to make the EU a "genuine tiger."

    The EU has longed for a common European military capacity that would allow it to formulate and pursue a defense policy separate from that of NATO, which is dominated by the US.

    Many European officials believe an autonomous European militarycapacity is necessary for the union to have a meaningful foreign policy and give it a stronger voice in world affairs. Otherwise, they argue, Europe's individual states are too weak to play a role independent of the US.

    The US has opposed such a policy as an unnecessary duplication of NATO, which already pools European military resources under a single command and plans to build a new headquarters complex in Brussels in the next few years.

    The controversy over the Iraq war convinced many Europeans -- French people and Germans, in particular -- of the need for a separate capacity and separate facilities that would allow Europe to pursue its own agenda without the approval of Washington.

    The rifts between the US and Europe cannot be repaired so easily because they are rooted in the drive to re-divide the world's strategic resources among the major powers in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

    By now, Washington has been able to press its predatory ambitions to the full -- first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq by relying on its overwhelming military advantage over its European rivals.

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