Adnkronos Brussels, March 19 (Adnkronos) – The European Union's rearmament is not against the US: "what the defense industry needs now is long-term contracts from member states and we are encouraging EU countries to work closely and have a long-term perspective with investments". This was stated to Corriere della Sera by Henna Virkkunen, one of the executive vice-presidents of the European Commission, who led the preparation of Safe, the instrument that makes 150 billion euros in defense loans available to EU countries.
"Defense policy is a competence of the member states, but we know that we live in a very dangerous world and our security situation is very alarming," Virkkunen explains. "The role of the European Union is therefore to deal with the financial part, how to support the financing and how to strengthen our defense industry and its competitiveness. And then there is a third element: military mobility, for which we have too little money today, but we know that the member states need it. The member states that are further east see the threats much more dramatically than those that are not so close to the eastern border."
"US technologies are often the best in the world in many sectors," he concludes. "In our defense industry strategy, we have already said that in 2030 we should have an industrial base that allows us to purchase 50% from European markets. In the future, we will continue to purchase outside the EU. This is not against the US. We have not yet reached this point: we are proposing the safe loan instrument, the national safeguard clause, flexibility for cohesion funds. But we have promised to also examine other instruments and we are also preparing the new EU budget."