EDA chief: Defence budget race with US is irrelevant

What Europe should worry about is its weak spending on research in
defence technology, not the comparisons with the general American
defence budget, says European Defence Agency chief Nick Witney in
an exclusive interview with EURACTIV.

Europeans acting together on the ground in Bosnia and Congo have
made the EU’s security and defence ambitions “real and tangible,
and it provides tremendous encouragement for people to think that
it does make sense” to reorganise European defence procurement on a
more collective basis, says Nick Witney, chief executive of the
newly established European Defence Agency (EDA) to
EURACTIV. 

He refused to join in the debate on whether
Europe should spend more on defence: “A lot is made of the
differences in the levels of expenditure on the two sides of the
Atlantic. I generally regard that as a bit of an irrelevance. The
US is a global hyper-power, and as far as I know, the EU does not
aspire to that role. So why is it worrying with the
Americans spending twice as much on defence?” 

However, Witney does think that the low
level of European spending on research and technology is
problematic if Europe wants to maintain important defence
industries of strategic value: “We should be worried that the
Americans spend five times as much on defence research and
technology than Europeans do.” 

Witney also highlights a lack of European access to US defence
markets: “The terms of transatlantic trade at the moment are not
satisfactory, they are unequal. The very protectionist mood that
you see running around particularly in the US congress, can’t be
good for the Americans in the long run. Ultimately protectionism is
self-defeating.“

While there is a broad European consensus that national defense
procurement programs are no longer sustainable, Witney does not
expect it will be “at all quick or easy to arrive at a position
where a new EU regulation of defence is adopted”. 

EDA is therefore in the process of considering parallel options
such as an intergovernmental voluntary code of conduct that would
speed up the effort towards greater liberalisation of defence
procurement.

See the full
interview.

Read more with Euractiv

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