The foreign and defence ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain issued the call in a joint communique after a meeting in Paris on Thursday (15 November).
The paper says: ?We are convinced that the EU must set up, within a framework yet to-be-defined, true civilian-military structures to plan and conduct missions and operations.?
It adds: ?We should show preparedness to hold available, train, deploy and sustain in theatre the necessary civilian and military means.?
It lists a number of EU military priorities for the coming years: helping Somalia to fight Islamists and pirates; ?a possible training mission to support the Malian armed forces? in reconquering north Mali; ?assistance to support the new Libyan authorities? against Islamist militias; ?normalisation? of the Western Balkans; ?conflict resolution? in Georgia; and police training in Afghanistan.
The communique also calls for more ?pooling and sharing? of EU defence hardware in the context of crisis-related budget cuts.
It identifies ?space, ballistic-missile defence, drones, air-to-air refuelling, airlift capacities, medical support to operations [and] software defined radio? as pooling areas.
The reference to new ?civilian-military structures? comes after the UK last year blocked the creation of a new operational headquarters (OHQ) in Brussels for EU military missions.
Britain?s Telegraph newspaper earlier this week cited a ?senior French source? as saying that EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton supports the idea of an OHQ, which will become a ?ripe fruit? in the ?long-term? as EU military operations multiply.
Ashton officials denied the report.
Meanwhile, the UK?s role in future EU defence co-operation was a big topic at the Paris meeting.
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the UK can join the group-of-five at any time: ?The text which we have developed is open to all of our colleagues, especially Great Britain.?
French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the communique is designed to ?create a movement? ahead of an EU summit on defence in 2013.
For his part, Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski said: ?If the EU wants to become a superpower, and Poland supports this, then we must have the capability to exert influence in our neighbourhood ? Sometimes we must use force to back our diplomacy.?
He called for an ?ambitious? EU budget for 2014 to 2020 to help with defence co-ordination.
Speaking in a separate interview in UK newspaper The Times also on Thursday, Sikorski blamed British ?nostalgia? for past greatness as a reason why it is pulling back from EU integration and why it wants to cut the EU budget.
He touched on historic sensitivities by describing EU spending as a kind of ?Marshall plan.?
He said Poland and other former-Soviet-controlled EU countries missed out on the plan ? a massive injection of US money to rebuild Europe after World War II ? because UK and US leaders at a summit in Yalta in 1945 gave the Soviet Union control of eastern Europe.
?We fought Hitler alone, giving you [the UK] valuable time to prepare for fighting. But we did not enjoy freedom after World War II ? Because of Yalta, we could not benefit [from the Marshall plan]. European cohesion funds are our Marshall plan for catching up with Europe,? he noted.
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