By EU treaties, defence is a national prerogative. We have 27 armies, 27 defence policies, 27 defence budgets. We also have major “non-achievements”, which we need to overcome in the nearest future to achieve readiness. My take at the Business Europe event. Long thread ⬇️
🇪🇺 is becoming more effective in assisting Member States on defence matters. With EU programmes, we can agree priorities, attach funding and deadlines, take decisions without giving every country a veto, and hold an institution responsible and accountable for execution. Member States will invest many billions in 🇪🇺 EDPCIs - Drone and Counter Drone European Resolve, Eastern Flank Watch, Air Shield, Space Shield & Maritime Shield. The EU will facilitate effective cooperation in order to build those pan-European projects. Security of supply is a challenge for our defence readiness & defence ramp up: we will not be able to produce enough explosives if we fail to resolve the nitro-cellulose production deficit, or produce enough drones if we fail to resolve the magnet materials deficit. Another issue - ramp-up. Ramp-up of defence industrial production is key to defence readiness. Some industries, in peacetime have quite a limited demand for their products, but that demand can increase by 10 times when the war comes. Such industry must maintain “ever warm” production capacity ready when orders are low. Production lines must be ready to restart when needed, critical components in stock and skilled labour force ready to surge production immediately. An obstacle to European defence production ramp-up is that a lot of traditional European production by our big primes is what they themselves call “haute couture” production: technologically very advanced, very expensive and difficult to scale. Ukraine's defence industry & battle-tested experience shows that it's enough to have a “good enough”product. Good enough to hit the targets, provide security for military personnel, not too technically advanced, making it cheaper & easier to scale production. Defence market fragmentation - major obstacle for 🇪🇺 defence companies to become leaders in global competition. Everything is fragmented in defence: Procurement, production, certification, intra-EU transfers, testing, etc. not allowing industries to ramp-up their production. The last European Council expressed very strong support for an integrated defence market! And it's also strongly supported by the European Parliament. We will soon present an ambitious defence market package. Working together we can achieve this major breakthrough! Logistics is the most important part of defence readiness. We already succeeded to cut bureaucratic red tape for defence industry with the defence readiness omnibus, drastically speeding up permitting to make it easier for you to produce goods. We proposed an ambitious Military Mobility package - to get rid of major obstacles to cross borders between EU Member States. But in military mobility the problem is not only crossing borders, but also who will transport military goods in case of emergency. An emergency will demand a huge number of flat-beds for trains, lorry trucks, cargo and passenger ferries, cargo air lift and so on. We are ready to work together with specialized European industries to make this happen. To make sure we have the logistics, which will enable us to prevent war and preserve peace. ⬇️ Full keynote at the Business Europe event “Security, Resilience and Competitiveness: Europe's Industrial Agenda for a New Geopolitical Era” ec.europa.eu
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