Even the United States, with a single military command chain, inadvertently bombs Red Cross food depots. A United States of Europe for research is still off the radar screen, and collateral damage is inevitable when the interests of feuding factions prevail over coordinated strategies of mutual value. The excellent European Bioinformatics Institute came under friendly fire in 1999 when its funds dried up after member states blocked the European Commission from funding large-scale research infrastructure. Europe's commanders now risk repeating the error, hitting efforts to deepen Europe's advanced research networks (see page 475).

Support for research infrastructure has been the rallying cry of Philippe Busquin, head of research at the European Commission, with apparently whimsical support from the council of research ministers — a sort of uneasy Northern Alliance of the 15 member-state warlords of the European Union (EU) who control 95% of European research funds. Busquin wants a research policy of European unity, but warlords believe that they manage better, and are loath to yield ground to the commission, which they suspect of power-grabbing.

The third player is the European Parliament, an assembly of tribal leaders directly elected from member states, with allegiances also to pan-European political camps. A weak body, every five years it can nonetheless veto the alliance's key strategic plank — the five-year 'Framework' programmes for joint EU research. All three parties are now engaged in trench warfare over the small print of the sixth Framework, with lines and paragraphs being taken and lost in battles that are won by horse-trading and defections.

In the heat and dust, broader perspectives are sometimes lost. Busquin's request to increase funding for infrastructure to 800 million euros (US$700 million) risks being plundered by the other parties to pay for pet topics. Warlords prefer to divide infrastructure — and its rich pickings in jobs and prestige — among themselves. The result in the past has often been ill-coordinated development, for example in neutron and light sources. Europe's fragile coalition needs to wake up to the fact that a secure mechanism for long-term planning and support of research infrastructure, at the European level, is not an item for barter, but a fundamental priority.