02 June 2021
New study maps the minefields the European Defence Fund will have to avoid
by Brooks Tigner
The European Defence Fund (EDF) will not spur delivery of the defence capabilities Europe needs unless it strikes a very careful balance between supporting excellence at national levels and promoting cross-border co-operation in capability development, new report by the European Parliament has warned.
The EDF will not deliver the defence capabilities Europe needs unless it balances supporting excellence at national levels and promoting cross-border co-operation in capability development, according to a European Parliament report. (Getty Images)
Commissioned by the parliament's sub-committee on security and defence (SEDE), the 110-page study, Lessons for the Implementation of the European Defence Fund, argues that unless the European Union's (EU's) big four prime contractors of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain open up their value and supply chains, then “there will be no shared ‘political ownership' among the 27 EU countries and thus no interest in defending an autonomous European DTIB [defence technological and industrial base]”.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) debated the study's merits during a SEDE hearing in Brussels on 31 May.
“The first obstacle the EDF must overcome is the conflict of objectives: reconciling competition with co-operation,” Frédéric Mauro, Belgian lawyer and defence economics researcher, told the hearing. He and two others – French researcher Edouard Simon and Ana Isabel Xavier, professor at Portugal's Autonomous University of Lisbon – authored the report, a copy of which Janes received prior to its publication, set for later in June.
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