“Europe needs to act faster and invest more in defense to have a chance to lead the global rearmament and be ready for today’s risks, said French admiral Pierre Vandieu, who in September became commander of NATO’s Joint Task Force on Transformation (SACT).”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Europe needs to act faster and invest more in defense to have a chance to lead the global rearmament and be ready for today’s risks, said French admiral Pierre Vandieu, who in September became commander of NATO’s Joint Task Force on Transformation (SACT).
Source: “European Truth” with reference to Politico
Details: In his first interview in office, Wandier emphasized that “Europe will not be able to win future armed battles with the rules it has set for itself.”
One of the problems he called excessively meticulous adherence to various rules and excessive perfectionism in the development of new weapons and equipment.
Wandier direct speech: “Now we have to demonstrate the ideality of everything in the weapons that the manufacturer has to deliver in 15 years… If we are going to keep the pace in the arms race, we need to change the rules.”
In the Politico publication with the admiral’s comments, several examples of various weapons were given. For example, the project of the new Griffon armored personnel carriers had to be revised because the lighting elements were placed too high and did not meet road standards. And French frigates have to wait years for certain upgrades, while the Americans carry out these procedures in a few days.
Vandier expressed the opinion that Europe should learn from the US military approaches to technology and modernization.
He also added that due to the way the situation is developing in Asia, it is important for the US that Europe also has a powerful defense industry. The admiral expressed confidence that the European defense industry can be “something much more than a contractor” for American companies.
“I’m optimistic… It’s time to wake up. We can really do something very good. That means we need to use funds efficiently, take bigger risks and do more experiments,” Vandier said.
He called one of the key future challenges for allies that military operations will require increasingly greater synchronization of many components: land, sea, air, operations in cyberspace, the information field and even in space.
Vandier believes that space, IT and logistics are currently the weakest links.
“10% of the world’s population lives in Europe, and Europe accounts for 50% of various social benefits… There are times when we have to say to ourselves that if we want to be able to defend ourselves, we need to revise it a bit,” the admiral said, speaking about defense spending .
Prehistory:
- The head of NATO’s military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, called on the countries of the Alliance to increase defense spending to 3% of GDP.
- Recently, it became known that several EU countries have agreed to cooperate in the development of air defense, kamikaze drones and EW.