At the beginning of next week, EU ministers will meet in the Foreign and Defense Councils in Brussels on the sensitive issue of the delivery of heavy ammunition to Ukraine. These are 155mm caliber projectiles of various types and manufacturers, with an average cost of around €4,000 each: the war in Ukraine is devouring them in large quantities, and the highly fragmented EU military industry is struggling to keep up . “Basically, we have an industrial problem, that’s the whole point,” explains a senior EU official, “which is why we put a plan in place” to try to fix it. The proposal put forward by High Representative Josep Borrell is based on three “rails”. The first aims to deliver 155mm ammunition to Ukraine as soon as possible, coming from the existing stocks of the Member States or from the redeployment of orders already placed: for this purpose, 1 billion euros should be made available to the States reimburse this aid through the EU Peace Facility (which is 63% funded by only 4 member countries: Germany, France, Italy and Spain).
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The second track is to boost aggregate demand for ammunition and encourage states to buy together, either through the European Defense Agency or by joining at least three by buying from EU producers (to subcontract to the military industry and they encourage production). . Another billion euros should be made available for this, again for the European Peace Facility, to compensate the states that supply ammunition to Ukraine.
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The third track is to increase the productive capacity of and support the EU defense industry. In the past thirty years, Borrell stressed, the European armaments industry had accumulated “a significant deficit in production capacity”. If the first “lead” lasts relatively short, it is in fact already operational, even if it is not known exactly how many stocks of these ammunition states are in the nation states (“it is classified information”, the source replies ) that the other two have long time. If the joint purchasing program begins immediately, the first orders could likely be placed by “the end of May,” a “very ambitious” but “realistic” timeframe. The problem is the delivery times: they are currently around “twelve months” in Europe for this type of ammunition. This means that the first ammunition delivered to Ukraine through joint procurement would arrive in May 2024, maybe a few months sooner if the industry manages to squeeze the times a bit. The problem, in addition to the search for agreement between member countries, is the productive capacity of the European Union’s military industry, which was born as a peace project and dedicated to the exercise of “soft power”. And with the Russian military stationed in Ukraine, delivery times are not a secondary variable.