EDA Sets Out Long Term “Vision” for Europe’s Defense Base

The EU’s European Defence Agency recently released a “Long-Term Vision report” intended to serve as a compass for defence planners over the next twenty years. The report was the product of 11 months of study involving officials and experts from governments, defense bodies, academia and industry across Europe, and was debated by the EDA Steering Board which consists of the Defence Ministers of the Agency’s 24 participating Member States and the European Commission.EDA head Javier Solana: “Given the lead times typically involved in developing defence capability, decisions we take, or fail to take, today will affect whether we have the right military capabilities, and the right capacities in Europe’s defence technological and industrial base, in the third decade of this century…” Against Solana’s speech, we offer the Jane’s Group’s description of their October 10, 2006 conference “Europe – Policies. Budgets. Markets“: “This conference is designed to provide a critical analysis of European defence and of the prospects for those who supply it. Unlike the United States, Europe has no huge and excellently financed buyer with the power of the [US] Department of Defense. The ministries of the European Union have neither collective vision nor individual budgets that are capable of […]