Defence, Crosetto: 'Raw materials enable technology development, Mattei Plan decisive'

The government is moving. The minister recalled that 'Professor Caputo, Italy's greatest expert in artificial intelligence, is working for us to see how to organise armed forces and defence, how to make Ai useful to increase our capacity for analysis and optimise our defence. We also deal with raw materials, because where there are means looking at where there will be conflicts. We talk about technologies that rely on raw materials that as Europe we import 100 per cent from China, the US imports 80 per cent. So all the raw materials of the future are non-European and therefore we have to deal with this scenario,' Crosetto added.

Italy, as reiterated by Crosetto, is almost totally dependent on imports, which makes it vulnerable to supply risks: suffice it to say that 97% of magnesium comes from China; heavy rare earths, needed for the permanent magnets used in wind turbines and electric vehicles, are only refined in China; 63% of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 67% of the latter is refined in China.

Crosetto confirmed this on more than one occasion: 'We are 90% dependent on China for rare earths. For lithium 78% as Europe. So to ask ourselves the question of European defence is to ask ourselves the question of when the Sevarstels will come out, when the Samp/T battery will be ready, but also to ask ourselves the problem of where to locate the lithium reserves for the next thirty years, of how to think about supplying ourselves with rare earths in the next thirty years, of how to think about exploiting at European level, not national level, the deposits of the future, which are the submarine ones, where a single deposit has perhaps 7,000 times all the material that there is on the whole earth. How to exploit space from this point of view. These are the challenges of the future,' the Defence Minister recalled.

Raw materials, supply chains, artificial intelligence, but also a framework to develop a true European defence. Which, Crosetto recalled, 'must include 27 countries, or rather it must be understood as continental, so with Turkey, Norway, and the countries of the East, put together in an alliance even larger than political Europe. As a group of five, i.e. Italy, Poland, Great Britain, France and Germany, we have tried to force steps to make the armed forces work together and standardise training practices, we also need common rules on what we buy and that what we buy is interoperable'.

'We need competition in the defence sector,' added Crosetto, 'because the production capacity is too slow and expensive compared to the US or Russia, which cost considerably less and with less money produce more than us and NATO. There is a way forward for defence companies, there is now osmosis with civil production. There will always be more osmosis, but we will always need a dual track to increase the level of technology and have products that are less expensive than the ones we have now. In a very complicated scenario'.

At the end of June, NATO could ask the member states to further increase the defence budget. "On Safe there will still be a reflection in the coming weeks that is up to Giorgetti who has my trust and has the credit for the results achieved such as the lowest spread in history towards Germany," said Crosetto. "As a minister, I have the duty to say that we need greater investments those that the government will be able to give are fundamental to build a future defence. I think NATO will ask for 3-3.5 per cent of GDP, the Americans will ask for 5 per cent: they will not be achievable immediately, but the goal for the next few years is to increase defence spending'.

The minister emphasised that 'investment in defence products necessarily produces growth in the civil sector, there is a total osmosis between the two areas. It is not for nothing that Fincantieri,' Crosetto recalled, 'is a leader in the production of military ships and at the same time a leader in the production of cruise ships, and it is one of the companies best prepared to face the future market because the cruise market has forced it to have a timing, a production quality, and a speed that if carried over into defence will make it better prepared than all the others. The same goes for AgustaWestland (Leonardo Group, ed.) which has applied military technologies to the civil side and has become the world leader in the civil helicopter sector'.

Crosetto's all-round intervention also touched on the Gaza dossier. "Italy, among western countries, is the one that has had the most linear and correct position on Gaza,' he said. 'We have never retreated a day from our position of two peoples two states, we were the hardest when Israel invaded Lebanon to call it back to its international obligations. It seems right to say to Israel and Netanyhau today that what is happening risks harming Israel. It is right for a nation that is a friend of Israel to tell Netanyhau that he is doing it wrong".