The goal of strategic autonomy in defence, put forward in the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy, has sparked a somewhat abstract debate, often fuelled by doubts and fears, on what it means in practice and how it would impact NATO and the transatlantic relationship. In the following article, the European Defence Agency (EDA) Chief Executive Jorge Domecq argues that strategic autonomy is too important an ambition to be flogged to death in endless theoretical talk on its end-goal. What counts, he says, are practical steps allowing the EU to move closer towards this goal.

One of the historical barriers – and there are still too many – to collaborative multination defence programmes in Europe has been the lack of budgetary synchronicity between the EU’s Member States. The Cooperative Financial Mechanism (CFM) stands now ready to mitigate this problem.

The following article looks into the wide range of activities, projects and programmes EDA is running in the growing domain of cyberdefence.

Naval forces throughout Europe struggle to maintain a sufficient number of specialised diving teams able and ready to intervene 24/7 in the event of maritime accidents or military crises, let alone deploy them to international operations for longer periods of time. European cooperation, i.e. military diving squads from different EU countries helping out one another or teaming up for common operations, could alleviate the problem. However, this option fails because of a lack of harmonisation in training and equipment standards. EDA is working towards filling this gap.