As part of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, the Czech Ministry of Defence organises the conference named Importance of Modern Technologies for European Defence and Security in Prague on July 19-20th, 2022. The conference will discuss the challenges and opportunities furnished by technological modernisation of the EU Member States’ armed forces.
Europe has not experienced an armed conflict for many years, but Russia’s aggression against Ukraine changed everything. Due to this unprecedented act, the security environment on the old continent and beyond became less stable and more unpredictable. Increasing defence investments and accelerating armed forces modernisation have become more critical than ever. That is why the Czech MoD is organising a conference to provide a venue for discussing joint defence development as well as the decisive influence of new technologies on security and the formation of national, European and NATO responses to those challenges. The conference attendees will include experts from the Czech Republic, namely from the Ministry of Defence and the leading Czech Technical Universities and defence and security industries, as well as from the European Commission, the European Defence Agency and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The first part of the conference will be dedicated to the joint planning, development and acquisition in the European Union. The subject arose from an analysis the Council has tasked in May following the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including to the effect of scoping the EU defence investment gaps. Under the headline “Rethink, Rebuild, Repower”, the analysis proposes a variety of measures to intensify and rationalise cooperation on urgent backfilling of essential military materiel stocks. The conference speakers will share their experience with the existing joint military materiel acquisition processes and outline further possible development in relation to the tools set forth in the Defence Investment Gaps Analysis.
The development of advanced technologies, which represents both an opportunity and a risk, is a game-changer. That is what the second part of the conference will address – the development and proliferation of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDTs) increasingly influence the global distribution of power among and within states. Countries failing to sufficiently modernise their armed forces to include a broader harnessing of EDTs will run the risk of their equipment’s obsolescing in leaps vis-á-vis their opponents, and of deepening the capability gap among individual nations’ armed forces.
The third and final conference panel will look into the cooperation between the EU and NATO defence innovation initiatives. Both organisations realize that technological superiority means a strategic advantage. NATO has recently put forward two new instruments to maintain its technological edge: the Innovation Fund and the DIANA accelerator. The European Union does not stay behind either – it intends to increase the European Defence Fund budget and build the Hub for EU Defence Innovation (HEDI) as part of the European Defence Agency. Strengthening the cooperation between the EU and NATO, including in this domain, is the key to success and a strategic interest of the Czech Republic. This domain was thus selected as one of the Czech MoD priorities for the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU.
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