Defence: Mariani says Safe is a concrete EU initiative to support countries in increasing their defence spending

Industries have already invested heavily, even without any support

The Safe defence funds represent “a concrete effort by the European Union to move forward and to help countries increase their spending on security and defence”. Speaking at the Fii Europe forum, Leonardo’s CEO Lorenzo Mariani emphasised the importance of adopting the financial instruments made available by the European Commission for defence programmes at a time when the Italian government is still considering whether to sign up to them.

"Europe is taking a much more serious approach than in the past" to defence," Mariani began. "Our industry has made an exceptional effort to increase production capacity and has also invested heavily, even without government support. But the complexity remains, especially for countries facing these new security threats. “The only answer is collaboration,” added Mariani, highlighting both the importance of financial instruments and the need to “harmonise technical requirements”, because if all countries demand different aircraft and ships, “it is difficult to achieve the scale needed to compete on a global level”.

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