Toespraak Commandant der Strijdkrachten bij Euronews Defence & Space Summit in Brussels (30 september)

Ladies and gentlemen,

I could tell you that Europe is under threat of war.
Or that Europe must be able to stand on its own two feet.
I could tell you that the lessons of tomorrow’s war are already being written in Ukraine today, and that we must learn from them.

But we all know that.

From the perspective of a Chief of Defence, there is really only one question that takes precedence over all others:

Will our armed forces get the equipment they need, at the moment they need it?

We are currently facing a window of vulnerability until 2030.
It is the gap between today’s threats and an armed force that will only be ready several years from now.
Within that window, we must ensure that strong deterrence is in place.
And if deterrence fails, we must be able to fight.

We know our capability targets.
We know our shortfalls.
We know what we must develop.
And we are fully aware that Europe itself must produce more of the equipment that our armed forces require.

Not in five years.
Not in ten years.
But within the very timeframe in which we must deter, and potentially fight.

Ladies and gentlemen.
Four years ago we CHODs said: let us prevent every country from building its own drones.
And what are we –my own country included – doing four years later?
We are all building our own drones.

That is not a criticism of any single country or organisation.
It is a reflection of where we stand as a continent.
We have made real progress.
We know what we need and when we need it.

Europe has tools for joint procurement, industrial cooperation and research.
And European leaders have agreed on nine Priority Capability Areas.
So Europe has woken up, and we possess all the tools for European cooperation that we need.

But are we using these European tools effectively?
Are we working together with sufficient speed to ensure that we will be ready in time?

Ladies and gentlemen.
The success of European defence cooperation will not be measured by the number of programmes we create, but by the equipment we put in the hands of our soldiers when it matters most.

Take, for example, the European Defence Agency’s Government-to-Government matchmaking platform.
The idea is simple: countries put their requirements and projects on the table, and the platform helps them to find suitable partners.
In a way, it is much like Tinder.
With all the same frustrations.
To make a match, you need a sufficient number of participants on the platform.
And once a match is made, someone must take action.

It is clear that Member States, my own included, are not putting all of our projects up on the platform.
Furthermore, the information provided is often not detailed enough to enable meaningful matches.
Just as on Tinder, profiles do not always reflect reality.
And even when you do get a match, someone has to respond. 
You might get the impression that I am spending a lot of my time on Tinder looking for a match.
Let me reassure you: I have been happily married for many years.

Ladies and gentlemen,
The problem is not that we have no tools for greater defence cooperation within the EU.
The problem is that the tools only work if we use them in the right way.
A marketplace only works if people are willing to trade.
Because there is still a sentiment that I understand in a way. I am not naïve.

Too often, we still begin by asking: What share of defence industry contracts can my own country secure?
Only after we have established that do we look for partners.
And only then do we attempt to make defence cooperation work.
We must reverse this logic.
We must start with the military requirement.
We must start with the speed at which we need it.
And only then can we decide who should build it.

This could be a group of countries.
It could be all 27.
But we need to make the right decisions now, before every country goes back to its own national industry.
We do not need 27 different drone programmes or 27 separate production lines.
If we continue in this way, there is the risk of our equipment arriving too late,
being too diverse,
becoming too expensive,
and remaining insufficiently developed compared to our adversaries.

I completely understand that the pie must be divided fairly.
Our tax payers deserve that.
We need a way to ensure that all of our national industries can benefit from European cooperation over time.

For instance:

At Eindhoven Air Base, in the south of the Netherlands, several NATO countries share a unique fleet of tanker and transport aircraft.
The question is not whether every country has deployed exactly the same number of aircraft.
The real question is whether the arrangement has delivered the necessary military effect, with contributions and benefits that balance out over time.
We could apply this same principle to the defence industry.
Every time we procure a capability, instead of immediately asking whether industrial benefits are balanced,
we should instead assess every two or three years whether national industries have benefited sufficiently from overall cooperation.

Ladies and gentlemen.

In Ukraine, we are seeing how quickly technology can change the battlefield.
The sensor-to-shooting loop, from detecting a target to attacking it, has in some cases been reduced from twenty minutes to approximately one minute.
That is not a small technological improvement.
That is a fundamentally different way of waging war.

In modern warfare, the greatest sin is delivering the perfect system too late for it to be relevant.
So we have to ask for a short-cycle layer alongside our long-term programmes: something that allows us to test, fail, learn, adapt and scale up in months rather than years.
We must bring our armed forces and industry closer together.

In Ukraine, I have seen how the armed forces and industry are in the trenches together.

“ Oh, is that drone no longer working? Let’s see if we can get it going again with a software update.”

That is the kind of speed we need.
That is the kind of innovation we need.
That is the kind of cooperation we need.
And our European instruments can move at the same speed.

If battlefield technology changes in weeks, our funding mechanisms, our procedures and product standards cannot take years to deliver.
That is also a responsibility for us CHODs, who decide on the requirements

Ladies and gentlemen.

I say here: Europe has almost everything
We have made progress.
We have the knowledge.
We have the industry.
We have the tools.

In short, we have the bucks and the brains.
Now we need the guts to turn things around.

So I have three request: one to governments, one to industry, and one to the EU.

To governments:

Put military requirements first, and organise industrial cooperation around them.
Ask yourselves: what instructions are you giving to your representatives?
Is it still only a matter of red lines and national interest?
Or do your instructions also encourage them to support what is in our collective interest?

We must accept that we may need to temper our separate national interests to achieve a greater European military effect.

To industry:

We need you to work together more closely.
To think like partners who can achieve anything.
Share the knowledge and expertise that will accelerate development.
Go for low cost, mass production and fast delivery.
And help us move from a hundred systems to a thousand.

To the European Union:

The tools are at our disposal.
Now we must ensure that they are fit for purpose, in line with our military requirements.

We must make them easier to use, cut the red tape,  and ensure that we can deliver.

Because if battlefield technology evolves in weeks, our institutions cannot take years to respond.
And if we want industry to move at battlefield speed, our governments cannot afford to move at peacetime pace.
That is the agreement we must reach together.
Only then will our deterrence be credible.
And only then will we be ready in time to defend our continent.

Thank you.