New EU fund step toward defense independence

The European Commission launched the European Defence Fund on June 30. The fund is based on an agreement on a budgetary program for industrial cooperation in the field of defense, and marks a new step in European strategic interdependence, said European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton in a statement.

According to the statement, the fund is based on the principle of co-financing between the European Union and its member countries. With €8 billion ($9.49 billion), the fund will represent 13.5 percent of the EU's total defense R&D spending, and it should become a multiplier for pre-existing cooperative projects, not a filler of financial gaps.

The first investment of the fund is €1.2 billion in large-scale defense platforms, such as next generation fighter systems or ground vehicles fleet, digital and modular ships and ballistic missile defense, and critical technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the military cloud, secured semiconductors, as well as space and cyber technologies and medical responses.

It is the increasingly fierce competition among major players and the rising uncertainties that have prompted the bloc to launch the initiative that was first proposed in 2017. The hope is that it can make the defense industries of the EU members more integrated, competitive and innovative.

The bloc is well aware that the new technology revolution means that they have to strengthen cooperation and coordination in the research and development of cutting-edge defense technology so as to complement the EU's "soft power" with "hard power". The fund, as Breton said in the statement, marks a new step for European strategic interdependence.

In other words, with the fund in place, the EU will be better able to cope with challenges from geopolitical games independently, and that will enable it to reduce, if not get rid of, its reliance on the United States for security, and seize more initiative in its own hands in the future big power competition.

－ZHAO KE, A RESEARCHER IN STRATEGY STUDIES AT THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF GOVERNANCE