EU to boost civil and military security research

Participants at a security research conference called for more and better spending and stressed the importance of R&D to strengthen the European defence industry.

At the Hampton Court summit in October 2005 the EU leaders asked Javier Solana, the head of the European Defence Agency (EDA) to come up with proposals on how to strengthen European defence research and technology (R&T).

In the first EDA R&T conference on 9 February 2006, Solana called for more and better spending on research and underlined the importance of “spending together”. The Commission’s Vice-President Günter Verheugen called for co-ordination between civil and military security research agendas and the avoidance of duplication.

“EDA is trying to make 2006 the year of the ‘paradigm shift’ in defence R&T. An initiative I think we all should fully support. It is high time we got something done in this field,” said the president of the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe, Tom Enders. 

Research and technology are important not only to improve Europe’s defence capabilities: they are “fundamental for the health of European defence industry,” said Javier Solana. “We can debate just how much of that technology we should generate in Europe, for reasons of autonomy, and how far we can rely on the global market. But we clearly need much of it under our own hands. And for that we need a globally competitive European defence industry,” he continued.

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