Photo by Rafik Wahba on Unsplash
The European Commission has proposed what is calls “an ambitious set of new actions” to support the competitiveness and readiness of European defence industry.
It says that two years ago, Russia’s “unjustified, on-going war of aggression” against Ukraine marked the return of “high-intensity conflict on our continent.”
The European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS), says the EC, sets a “clear, long-term vision” to achieve defence industrial readiness in the European Union.
As a first immediate and central means to deliver the Strategy, the European Commission has tabled a legislative proposal for a European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) and a framework of measures to ensure the “timely” availability and supply of defence products.
The Strategy, it says, outlines the challenges currently faced by the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB) but also the opportunity to tap its full potential and sets out a direction for the next decade.
An EC spokesman admitted, “To increase European defence industrial readiness, Member States need to invest more, better, together, and European.”
Commenting, Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, said, “Today, we adopt a European Defence Industrial Strategy and table a proposal for a European Defence Industry Programme. We do so to respond to changes in Europe’s security paradigm. Our defence spending goes to too many different weapon systems, primarily bought from outside the EU.”
“Now that defence budgets in all Member States are rising sharply, we should invest better, which largely means investing together, and investing European.”
“This will enable us to move from a crisis response mode, to one of structural defence readiness. In a manner that closely integrates Ukraine.”
