Europe needs to take more risks, spend more, be faster and cut red tape to win the new global arms race, said Admiral Pierre Vandier, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO's Allied Forces. According to him, space, information technology and military mobility are also weaknesses. This was reported by UNN with reference to Politico.
“Europe will not be able to win the future arms battle with the rules it has set for itself today,” Pierre Vandier said in his first press interview after taking office in late September.
The obstacles facing European arms manufacturers and procurement agencies “can be characterized as over-compliance,” he said, adding: “you have to demonstrate that everything is perfect in the [equipment] you are going to deliver in 15 years, that not a single screw is going to be lost.
The French admiral hopes that next year's NATO summit in The Hague will send a signal to the EU: “If you want to stay in the arms race, change your rules.
Vandier's comments come as Europe seeks to rearm in response to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. EU countries are working to increase arms production, but still lag far behind Russia in ammunition production.
Weapons programs are also too slow and not flexible enough, Vandier said, adding that, for example, French frigates have to wait years for proper combat mode upgrades, while some American warships can be modernized daily.
“Given the scale of what's happening in Asia,” Washington needs a strong European defense industry, he said, adding that he is confident that European firms can be much more than ‘just a subcontractor’ for American companies.
I am optimistic, and I have a message: “It's time to wake up. We can actually do great things, and that means we have to use money well, take more risks, try more things
One of the main challenges, according to Vandier, is that planning military operations increasingly requires synchronization between different environments - land, air and sea, as well as space, cyber and information. That is why his priority for the next few years is “to create the conditions for the emergence of a multi-environmental command system: it's all about IT, command and control systems, cloud technologies of our networks.
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He also warned that space, IT, and logistics are currently the weakest areas.
“In space, we really need to make a significant effort. In general, we spend our money on a small number of high-performance, long-life geostationary satellites,” Vandier said.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk's SpaceX company can launch batches of small satellites with a single rocket, which significantly reduces the cost of the satellite.
Another area that needs to be improved is IT. “The real issue today is cloud computing,” which is a prerequisite for massive data processing and AI, the NATO commander said.
A third area for improvement is the movement of troops and equipment across the continent, something that has been neglected since the end of the Cold War, Vandier added.