European Defence Agency

What do you think needs to change in order for procurement to keep up with the needs of the warfighter from an innovation perspective?

The best example here is from the European Union and the EDA, the European Defence Agency.

They moved very fast to reduce the bureaucratic layers of approval and they compressed it to the maximum.

But here you have several aspects.

Do you know some of the background as to why it came about and also how did Ireland or how did the Defence Forces get involved in the course?

Yeah, so the European Defence Agency has a UAS training and evaluation or known as T&E program set up.

So basically this program is to kind of look at how UAS is being used across all 27 member states and try and say harmonize or standardize the way people are trained.

So can I set up common training syllabi, training standards, and then even look at setting up training networks or nodes across Europe.

It's the first in the history of Europe, Minister of Defense of European Union.

They don't have any European, they have European Defense Organization, EDA, European Defense Agency, but its capability is still very limited.

And so basically they completely relied on NATO.

There is GEF, Joint Expeditionary Force, but otherwise NATO is like 99% of what Europe thought about its own defense.