Fourteen NATO countries joined Germany on Thursday to jointly buy anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense materials, as part of an initiative called “European sky shield”, according to the AFP news agency.
This project, presented by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has as its particular objective the purchase of the Iris-T and Patriot systems, respectively of German and North American origin, explained the German Defense Minister, Christine Lambrecht.
Germany is leading this initiative, which has been joined by the United Kingdom, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania.
All countries are signatories to the proposal of intentions transmitted to NATO during the meeting of Defense Ministers of the Alliance.
Finland, a candidate for membership, joined the project.
“NATO’s new, fully interoperable and seamlessly integrated air and missile defense assets will greatly enhance our ability to defend the Alliance against all air and missile threats,” Mircea Geoana, NATO Deputy Secretary-General, said in a statement. release. .
“This commitment is even more crucial today, as we witness Russia’s ruthless and blind missile strikes in Ukraine, killing civilians and destroying essential infrastructure,” he said.
However, several media outlets cited by the Euractiv website admitted that the “European sky shield” indicated that it could be equipped with the Arrow 3 missile interception system, of Israeli origin.
France and Poland did not join this initiative, although a French source quoted by AFP referred to “an excellent initiative” and admitted that NATO “needs anti-aircraft, anti-missile and anti-drone defense systems.”
Paris argued that its “MAMBA” medium-range surface-to-air defense system is now fully integrated into NATO’s allied air command chain of control, while Warsaw said it intends to install its own air defense system.
At the end of last March, the German government had already agreed to acquire an Israeli anti-missile defense system, as revealed at the time by the president of the Parliament’s Defense Committee.
“Given the threat and the various weapons systems available to Russia, of course we should be interested, of course,” Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann told the Welt newspaper.
Parliament’s rapporteur for the defense budget, Andreas Schwarz, also considered at the end of March that “the Israeli Arrow 3 system is a good solution”, with a cost of some two billion euros and that it could be operational in 2025 from three locations in Germany.
After years of underinvesting in defense, Germany took a historic turn in late February, following the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine.
On February 27, a few days after the start of the Russian offensive, Olaf Scholz announced an exceptional financial allocation of 100,000 million euros to modernize the army and the goal of exceeding 02 percent of military spending in Gross Domestic Product.
Source: TSF
