More than 500 senior representatives from Europe’s aerospace, defence and security industries are in Istanbul on 6-7 October to address the overarching theme of ‘Global security as a collective challenge’, at the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) Annual Convention.
Ms. Claude-France Arnould, EDA’s Chief Executive, participated in a round table, together with Mr. Kemal Yardimci, the Turkish Deputy Minister of Defence; Mr. Murad Bayar, the Turkish Undersecretary of Defence Industries; Mr. Patrick Auroy, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investments and Mr. Domingo Ureña-Raso, the outgoing ASD President and his successor Mr. Klaus Eberhardt, CEO of Rheinmetall.
At this occasion, Ms. Arnould said “our ambitions– at EDA – are the ambitions of our stakeholders: the Member States. EDA works with our Member States to identify European collaborative solutions to satisfy their operational requirements be they short or long term” and she pointed out that Member States have a critical choice to make, a “structural transformation or the risk of undermining the future effectiveness of national capabilities and Europe’s ability to fully contribute to CSDP (and the NATO Alliance)”.
Ms. Arnould underlined EDA’s engagement in strengthening the European Defence, Technological and Industrial Base: “in a very real sense the Agency exists to put the business case for Europe. That’s a business case both for European military capabilities and a robust European industrial base to help provide them”.
When questioned on Defence budget cuts, Ms. Arnould mentioned that EDA has to be part of the solution, highlighting that “pooling and Sharing capabilities and assets has been recognized as an ideal approach to meet, more efficiently, European capability requirements particularly in a constrained budgetary environment”. Ms. Arnould revealed that EDA has “called on the assistance of a few senior level experts from the military and armaments community to investigate the support of the Member States on what are the most promising Pooling and Sharing opportunities; we will be putting a range of proposals to Ministers of Defence at our next meeting in November”. “Pooling and Sharing is no longer optional“, she concluded.
Jon Mullin, EDA Capability Director, also participated in this event’ Workshop 3 on Maritime security and the future of the naval sector, while Peter Scaruppe, Industry and Market Director, participated in the debate of Workshop 4 "New Dimensions of the Land Sector - New Technologies in the Land Sector, C-IED Solutions, Force Protection through Land Vehicles, C4ISR Utilisation”.