Europe needs a surge in defence.
We must prepare and respond to the threats we face today.
At the Informal EU leaders' retreat yesterday, we agreed we must work together as Europeans to prepare and respond by:
🛡️ urgently increasing defence spending,
🤝 strengthening coordination in defence,
✂️ simplifying our legislation,
💡 fostering defence innovation.
We will present a White Paper in March, for necessary decisions in June.
@EUCommission Right now we're in a hurry to rearm, but perhaps in the future EU should consider mandating that weapons bought by EU members must be manufactured in EU? It would decrease our dependency on third parties. US already does it and it works for them, so why not us?
Of course we would need a few exceptions, the most obvious one being wartime.
@elgregor @EUCommission US does it and we dont because when we tried to do it they started complaining and the EU gave in
Without a good defence industry as base you cant tell them no and keeping buying from them blindly never develops our capabilities...