| Author (Person) | King, Tim |
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| Series Title | European Voice |
| Series Details | Vol.10, No.27, 22.7.04 |
| Publication Date | 22/07/2004 |
| Content Type | News |
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By Tim King Date: 22/07/04 THE European Defence Agency approved last week by the EU's foreign ministers should be ready to embark on its first procurement projects next year, the head of the establishment team predicts. Nick Witney, head of the 14-strong team setting up the agency, said there was "a need to get out of the starting blocks as fast as possible" to maintain momentum behind the agency's creation. The ministers approved the agency with a budget for 2004 of just less than €2 million on 12 July. Witney told European Voice: "Today what you have is a legal construct with no money and no staff. In the coming months this situation will be rectified." He hoped that next year the agency would be able to coordinate ad hoc projects for technology demonstrators - an intermediate step towards the development and purchase of defence equipment. The agency has a remit to develop defence capabilities for crisis management, promote European armaments cooperation, strengthen the European defence, industrial and technological base and create a competitive European defence equipment market. Witney said whether the agency could achieve those goals would be dependent on the will of its steering board, the EU's defence ministers. "It won't achieve anything that defence ministers don't want to see achieved," Witney said. The agency is the creation of the Council of Ministers, is headed by the Council's Secretary-General, Javier Solana, with all the EU national governments save Denmark participating. Witney played down the possibility of power struggles with other institutions. "As soon as the agency tries to butt heads it will waste energy and effort," he said. "It's going to be small and it's going to have to be accepted." He said he saw no difference of opinion between the UK and France over the purpose of the agency. "Paris and London have been very much hand in hand on this and remain so. Things would not have happened so fast if they had not been," he said. Nor did he see the agency as being in competition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. "NATO will be helped, if Europe raises its game," he said. The main obstacle to better defence procurement in Europe was fragmentation, he said. It was widely recognized, he said, that the 25 EU states did not get a good return on the €160 billion spent each year on defence. "It will be up to each individual defence minister to spend their budgets a bit differently," he suggested. He predicted it could be ten years before the agency was carrying out major procurement projects on behalf of some or all EU states. He said the agency's success could be measured by "whether Europe's armed forces are becoming more capable, the defence industry base is healthier and we are looking at a more consolidated freer defence equipment market". Indication of failure would be "a loss of interest": if defence ministers failed to turn up to meetings of the steering board, if the agency had no volunteers to take part in its initiatives, if the agency no longer enjoyed support from the member states. The agency plans to expand its staff to 80 by the middle of next year. Whether Witney will be among them is still unclear. Although he is widely seen as in line for the post of chief executive, the defence ministers have yet to make the senior appointments. |
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| Source Link | http://www.european-voice.com/ |
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| Subject Categories | Business and Industry, Politics and International Relations, Security and Defence |
