Strengthening the European security and defence technological and innovation landscape is an important element of the process of reducing the EU’s strategic dependencies in critical technologies and value chains for security and defence. The European Commission has recently released a Roadmap on Critical Technologies for Security and Defence which advances a package of strategic measures to accelerate innovation across domains and foster technological sovereignty in the security and defence sectors. These measures include:
- identifying technologies critical for EU security and defence, boosting them through European (research, technology development and innovation – RTD&I) programmes;
- ensuring that defence considerations are better taken into account in civilian European RTD&I programmes and industrial and trade policies, as appropriate, while possible civilian uses of technologies are also better considered in defence RTD&I programmes;
- promoting from the outset an EU-wide strategic and coordinated approach for critical technologies for security and defence, to make the best use of EU and Member States’ RTD&I programmes, achieve synergies between civilian and defence RTD&I communities and mitigate strategic dependencies from external sources; and
- coordinating as much as possible with other like-minded partners, such as the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), under mutually beneficial conditions.
The full text of the Roadmap is available here.
Source: European Commission
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