EU defence chief urges states to stop making ‘haute couture’ missiles
The EU’s defence chief has urged countries to open up their arms stockpiles to supply Ukraine and boost production by moving away from “haute couture” weapons production.
“Governments should open their stockpiles to provide Ukraine with what they need,” the EU’s defence commissioner Andrius Kubilius told the FT.
Strengthening Ukraine’s military was all the more important if Europe reopened formal negotiating channels with Russia, Kubilius said, as
momentum grows in Europe for such talks.
“The only formula which can bring peace is so-called peace through strength. Strength should be on the Ukrainian side,” and Europe can help with that, he stressed.
The former Lithuanian prime minister also warned that Europe was lagging behind Russia and Ukraine in missile manufacturing because its companies were producing sophisticated and expensive weapons that were difficult to scale up.
“Europeans produce what they call ‘haute couture’ production. Technologically very sophisticated, very advanced, very expensive, and impossible to ramp up,’’ he said. ‘‘Ukrainians produce, what those European industries call, ‘good enough’
.”
Kubilius, who is spearheading Brussels’ efforts to strengthen Europe’s defence industrial base, said Europe needed to learn from Ukraine’s wartime methods and shift to cheaper systems that could be manufactured rapidly and at scale.
“The Ukrainians started to produce their own cruise missile Flamingo, and this year they are ready to produce around 700
.”
By contrast, he said, the EU made fewer than 300. Russia produced 1,200.
Ukraine could buy EU weapons from stockpiles using a €60bn weapons pot from a recently agreed €90bn loan, he said. The sellers could then use that money to buy more or scale up production.
His call comes as the EU is preparing initiatives aimed at boosting
defence production and reducing the fragmentation of Europe’s arms industry. Brussels is due to present a plan in July to create a more integrated market.
The proposal is set to tackle a patchwork of national rules and procurement practices that he said had in effect closed off defence markets and hampered cross-border industrial defence co-operation. “There is really no market and plenty of obstacles,” Kubilius said.
He argued that national governments heavily protect domestic defence champions, with large countries such as France and Germany buying 70 per cent of what their own industries produced, while only about 10 per cent was sold to other EU countries.
The planned reforms are set to tackle technical barriers such as mutual recognition of testing and certification procedures and simplifying intra-EU transfer licences for military components, which vary across member states.
Kubilius also said consolidation in the defence sector should be encouraged. Governments often invoke national security exemptions to avoid following market principles in defence procurement, creating what he described as a “really closed system”.
Europe should not fear the planned tie-up, dubbed Project Bromo, between Airbus, Thales and Leonardo, which aims to create a European space and satellite champion capable of competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Kubilius said.
For global competition, you need “scale and size”, he added. “This is exactly what Bromo is bringing. Now how to keep competitive environment back domestically, that’s always an issue, but I think it should not be an obstacle for us to scale up some of our champions.”