The Commission puts forward several Commission-led initiatives in areas critical for defence and security within the European Union.
FREMONT, CA: The Defence proposes several initiatives that are headed by the Commission in areas that are crucial for defence and security inside the European Union. A roadmap on crucial technologies for security and defence is also incorporated. These include a Contribution to European Defense, which addresses all challenges, from conventional defence industry and equipment on land, sea, and air to cyber, hybrid, and space threats, military mobility, and the relevance of climate change. These new measures represented tangible advances in the direction of a more competitive and integrated European defence market, especially through strengthening EU cooperation and achieving scale, cost control, and operational effectiveness. The Commission has contributed with its declaration as the EU Strategic Compass on Security and Defense approaches. By utilising all available tools in a geopolitical and technological environment that is constantly changing, the Commission seeks to improve the Union's capacity to counter rapidly growing, multi-layered challenges. In particular, the Commission has identified the following key new sectors to further boost the European defence market's competitiveness:
• Increased Member States' investments in vital enablers and essential strategic capabilities created or acquired through cooperative EU frameworks;
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• Encouraged the combined acquisition of defence capabilities that have been cooperatively produced within the EU;
• Urged member States to keep advancing toward more simplified and convergent methods of regulating the export of weapons, particularly for defence technologies created in a cooperative EU environment.
The European Defence Fund (EDF) will spend 1.9 billion Euros on initiatives that will advance defence research and capability by the end of 2022. This will encourage defence innovation while launching important large-scale collaborative capability development programmes. The Commission will also create new incentives to encourage Member States' investments in strategic defence capabilities, particularly in cases where those capabilities are created and/or acquired through cooperative EU frameworks. The Commission will specifically investigate several instruments to encourage the joint procurement of defence capabilities created cooperatively within the EU, including by proposing a Value Added Tax (VAT) waiver, establishing new financing options, and reviewing the EDF bonus mechanisms to favour commitments to joint procurement of equipment, maintenance, and operations in addition to joint development of the pertinent defence technologies. In the Annual Single Market Report, which is often released in connection with the European Semester Autumn Package, the Commission will include a chapter with remarks on developments, obstacles, and possibilities related to projects involving multinational defence capabilities. In general, the Commission will make sure that other horizontal measures, like programmes on sustainable finance, continue to be in line with the EU's efforts to make it easier for the European defence sector to obtain enough financing and investment.
The Commission invited the Member States to advance ongoing efforts to streamline and gradually converge further their arms export control practises, especially for those defence capabilities that are jointly developed, particularly in an EU framework. Member States are responsible for issuing export licences for military equipment. The Commission asked the Member States to seek a strategy whereby, in theory, they would not prohibit one another from exporting any military technology or equipment created in collaboration. This work should guarantee that EDF-funded goods would gain fair and competitive access to global markets without interfering with the sovereign decisions of member States.
