Good afternoon,
I will start from military mobility. I will try first of all to stress how important it is what we today are proposing.
I can remind you that importance by quoting a famous American General John Pershing, who was leading American troops during the First World War in Europe, and he said, “Infantry wins battles, logistics wins the wars”. So that is what you know military people are speaking about.
Those words are the best way to describe the significance of the Military Mobility package which is presented by the Commission.
Definitely, speed is a cornerstone of defence and deterrence. And what Kaja has said about 45 days - thats really what we cannot accept to allow ourselves to have such a luxury. We need to speak about minutes and hours, not weeks and months as till now.
So what we are proposing – to stress some very important points.
Big change that we are coming this time on military mobility with Regulation. Not communication, not plans, but with regulation as a legal instrument, which means that we are harmonising and streamlining military transport rules with a Regulation which moves from 27 national procedures of permits to one single Union procedure and resolving other challenges related to military transportation.
Secondly, we are introducing emergency framework. Different institutions should work during crisis and with automatic permits and priority access to rail and air military transport.
Very important is that we are introducing pooling and sharing capabilities to address the gaps of availability of transport capabilities like wagons, flatbeds, trucks, heavy airlift. The Regulation establishes a Solidarity Pool. The aim is to voluntarily share key dual use mobility capacities. They can be national, public, in advance contracted from civilian transport providers or procured by the Commission. It will be managed using Commission experience in management of assets to mitigate any kind of crisis.
And of course, the fourth is that we are ensuring readiness of dual use infrastructure and its resilience. With the regulation we put forward an obligation and a Resilience toolbox to identify, upgrade, protect and defend strategic dual use infrastructure.
And the last point is we are also Introducing governance and coordinating mechanism with the establishment of a cross-institutional Military Mobility Transport Group and National Coordinators and also reintroducing annual military transport readiness check and stress tests,
And the first one would be the stress test exactly on ensuring fast movements of military assistance towards Ukraine and the Unions Eastern borders. So that is about military mobility.
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Now a few words on the Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap.
Transform defence and learn from Ukraine in order to transform – those are two key messages of the Communication.
Transform not only the supply side, which means industry and production, but also the demand side by changing the understanding of modern warfare doctrine and what is needed on the modern battlefield.
Attention should be paid not only to the transformation of technologies, but also to the creation of transformative ecosystems, when research and development and innovation, industrial development and production, military testing and feedback from the front line – everything is acting in the same loop of defence ecosystem.
Again, that is what we need to learn from Ukraine, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence quantum are needed for our material defence readiness. Thats very clear.
But systemic disruption also is needed in our defence industrial processes (from development to production and procurement) and disruption is needed in industry and government and military relationships.
So the EU Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap sets the conditions for new ways of engaging with the defence industry, with new defence players, and also puts a way how to accelerate its transformation.
Key areas which are covered by 14 concrete actions (I will not go item by item, but I will stress just those key areas):
The first one is supporting the full investment journey of New Defence firms, especially in late stage funding for startups. We have a real problem when 60% of capital for those companies comes from outside of the European Union (especially from the United States), and we are losing those startupers for Europe.
Therefore we are proposing to launch of a defence focused EUR 1 billion fund of funds together with the European Investment Bank, repeating some kind of good experience what we did with similar initiatives a little bit earlier.
Second, what is very important is to accelerate time to market of defence technologies, and that is why we are coming with a new pilot instrument which we call AGILE. It will demand additional regulation later on, which we will present, but we are planning that this new instrument will enable to develop new solutions aligned with military needs within 6 to 12 months. AGILE would be designed to support single-companies to develop low-cost production in a very rapid manner, with lots of iterations with armed forces and something we can call DARPA style.
Third, the other 12 actions are covering the remaining two groups which we can call improving access to contracts and broaden the pipeline of innovative defence solutions. Again, there are very concrete proposals on what we need to do.
The fourth group is ensuring that Europe has the skills and talent to maintain its technological edge, again, looking into the very concrete steps which we need to implement in order to have skills for new defence industrial development.
Transformation in defence is the key and it is the only way towards stronger European defence ecosystem that will ensure credible defence readiness and deterrence ready for the wars of tomorrow
