"Fortress Europe" overtones heard.

• Position: Defense

If NATO is not the place to go for armaments cooperation, we should look towards the European Defense Agency (EDA) and the European Commission, especially on homeland security issues. This is an area which absolutely should be pursued. Of course, EDA's first foray did not succeed: it was the effort with armored fighting vehicles. There was a study that found 23 different national armored fighting-vehicle programs in Europe. That is crazy. NATO is affected by this because allies are deploying to Afghanistan with different kinds of equipment and without common logistics, common supplies, and common ways to do maintenance. In Provincial Reconstruction Teams, with five or six different countries manning them, everybody's got different gear there, so I hope that the EDA re-attacks on this issue of armored fighting vehicles, and also with similar types of situations. There is no reason why we should have this many different programs. It is entirely within the prerogatives of the EDA and its board of defense ministers to tackle this. This is money wasted.

Recently I read the EU defense ministers' statement on Europe's "defense and technological industrial base study." It was very well crafted, a worthwhile effort by the EU to come at this issue of harmonizing disparate programs, not at a programmatic level but at a strategic level. But as I read the document, it really got my blood boiling. As a defense ministerial communique, it had--and I saw it--a recognition of the need to try to get our hands around the technological base in Europe. But whose hands?

I saw fortress Europe in the document [titled A Strategy for the European Defense Technological and Industrial Bases.] In it, I read the paragraph, in particular, that starts identifying technologies, with its little subparagraph in there that screamed to me "fortress Europe." [At this point, he referred to the communique's heading about identifying key technologies.] It said:

"We need to identify, from a European perspective, the key defense technologies that we must seek to preserve or develop. Military capability need is the prime criterion, but we must also have regard to the needs of autonomy and operational sovereignty, and the need to sustain pre-eminence where this is economically valuable."

At the same time, if well-intentioned governments come at it from the standpoint of pursuing teaming arrangements, then there is promise, there is a path to offset the decline in defense spending and...