Britain Opposes Common EU Defense Fund

Britain Opposes Common EU Defense Fund
from: Reuters

Britain opposes the creation of a common European Union fund for defense research and wants EU states instead to focus on raising their meager spending in the area, a senior British official said on March 3.

EU defense ministers meet in Austria on Monday to discuss the proposed fund, which is aimed at narrowing the burgeoning lead of the United States in high-tech military equipment.

But Britain, which along with France is the biggest spender on defense research in the bloc, said it would resist the creation of a new centralized budget and pursue its policy of picking individual projects for cross-border cooperation.

“We want our European partners to spend more money on research, not just to create another central budget,” British Defence Procurement Minister Lord Drayson told BBC Radio 4.

The defense research fund was proposed last month by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and would be a virtually unprecedented example of EU countries pooling jealously-guarded national military budgets.

Britain spends around 700 million euros ($842 million) a year on defense research and technology out of an EU total of some 2 billion euros. France — a backer of the common fund — spends about the same as Britain, with other states far behind.

Washington spends five times more on such research than all EU states put together.

A British Ministry of Defence spokesman said that British Defence Secretary John Reid would not seek in Austria to veto a fund that would draw on voluntary contributions from EU states, but would state that Britain did not envisage transferring cash to it.

“We don’t want to transfer money into the fund from other budgets, we feel we are already doing an awful lot in this area. We want not just another bureaucratic process but real action,” the spokesman said by telephone.

The fund would be coordinated by the European Defence Agency, the EU body set up to coordinate EU defense activities. It has backing from industry, and European aerospace firm EADS EAD.PA has suggested it should start with a 50 million euro budget in 2007.

While that is a drop in the ocean compared to U.S. defense research spending, analysts say that any decision to launch such a fund could be a precursor to much greater coordination of EU defense spending in the long run.

So the gap between US. and the rest of the world (see EU) when it comes to military technology is going to become bigger and bigger! Stealths, AESAs Inteligence, Proccecors, Lasers, space tech, nuckes… etc etc. Do you believe that the above British opotition serves better the EU or the US interests?