Thread by @morcos_pierre

🇪🇺🇫🇷 Today, French defense minister @florence_parly presented France's priorities on security and defense for its upcoming presidency of the Council of the EU. A thread 👇
videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.11652742…

The overall ambition: pushing for greater European sovereignty to have the "freedom to decide, choose and act" to defend 🇪🇺 interests. This ambition is translated into 6 priorities.

1/ Agreeing on a common threat assessment among Europeans through the adoption of the Strategic Compass which will set the 🇪🇺 level of ambition for the next 10 years. "It won't be just another report but a real concrete action plan".

2/ Promoting joint operations with the ambition of making the 🇪🇺 more reactive. This means more synergies between 🇪🇺 missions and ad hoc operations (such as Takuba in the Sahel) and cooperation on hybrid threats.

This objective also requires the creation of a "rapid deployment capability". "It is not a question of developing yet another permanent force on paper but of working on what Europeans lack in order to act in the real world, such as air transport capabilities" stressed Min. Parly.

3/ Defending 🇪🇺 interests in contested common spaces:
- at sea (through coordinated maritime presences)
- in the cyber space (with a 🇪🇺 cyber defense policy and joint exercises)
- in the outer space (with a 🇪🇺 defense space strategy to be developed by 2023).

4/ Developing common military equipments. Minister Parly underlined that Europeans still have 17 different types of battle tanks, 29 types of frigates and destroyers, and 20 types of combat aircrafts.

5/ Encouraging innovation, in particular through the creation of an Innovation Defense Hub within the European Defense Agency.

6/ Forging balanced partnerships in Africa, in the Indo-Pacific and, of course, with NATO. "The development, in parallel, of the 🇪🇺 Strategic Compass and of NATO's next Strategic Concept is a unique opportunity to strengthen the complementarity between both organizations". [End]