The EU’s Court of Auditors said in a report, on Wednesday 26 April, that the EU lacks a long-term strategy for its defence spending.
In its report, the Court explains that while the European Defence Fund (EDF) precursor programme - the Preparatory Action on Defence Research (PADR) (with a budget of €90 million) - was useful in testing spending processes, its results were insufficient (see EUROPE 11771/7).
“PADR allowed the EU to test different options for funding defence research, but delays and lack of results have limited the lessons learned for the much more ambitious successor EDF” with a budget of €8 billion, explains Viorel Ştefan, the report’s lead author.
When the first EDF calls for proposals were launched in May 2021, more than half of the PADR projects had just started or had not even started yet, and only two were closed.
Furthermore, the auditors point out that PADR project coordinators and participants were concentrated in a handful of Member States with large defence industries, such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The same combinations of companies were involved in several projects and the vast majority of consortia simply continued their previous cooperation, they add.
According to the Court of Auditors, at the beginning of the PADR projects there were no plans for the subsequent exploitation of the research results or for the transition to production and public procurement.
Mr Ştefan also recalled that during the pilot projects, only the 2014 version of the Capability Development Plan was available, but since then additional tools and initiatives have been adopted. However, in his view, these new tools were only used to a limited extent for the first EDF work programmes.
Thus, in this context, the auditors warn that the European Commission has not yet adequately addressed the strategic issues that could prevent EDF projects from having the desired impact.
They advocate for a long-term defence strategy for the EDF, to be updated regularly. In their view, the strategy should pursue several objectives, such as increasing the presence of EDF-developed technology in the defence sector and ensuring that the capabilities developed meet the needs of the EU27 armed forces. It’s objective should also be to strengthen the EU’s defence industrial and technological base and clarify whether the EDF should focus on multiple small projects or a few large ones.
The Court of Auditors states as well that the European Commission and the European Defence Agency have agreed with all its recommendations.
See the report: https://aeur.eu/f/6ko (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)