Wie Italien und Deutschland eine europäische Verteidigungsindustriebasis aufbauen – Die deutsch-italienische Zusammenarbeit ist ein entscheidender Schritt zum Aufbau einer einheitlichen europäischen Verteidigungsindustriebasis

Ah yes. Old team united. We should invite Japan for globalization of this great team.

Cheap WW2 reference jokes asides, if today’s Germany and Italy can be as tight as purported, the next super major step is to have them also bring in proud France and the Brexiter Brits into tighter collaboration so the European defense industrial base can compete with the US and China.

Then Spain, Benelux, the Nordics, Poland and the Eastern, er Central, Europeans, and the others would probably follow.

Journalism is really hitting a low bar. We are very far away from any concrete cooperation between Germany and Italy, and especially far away from any of it being permanently structured. Sure, by all means, further EU defense base integration and cooperation is always a good thing, but lets not hype it up too much. We are miles away from it taking place, and when it does take place it usually ends up fraught with problems (khm FCAS/MGCS).

Almost two years later than it should.

This article is making the case for cooperation between national defence industries in the west by way of focussing on one example of German-Italian cooperation. For context, European countries very commonly collaborate with one-another or the USA to produce complex weapons systems – the example in the article is not an isolated case. A few examples:

– France-Italy: Aster missiles

– UK-Germany-Italy-Spain: Eurofighter (France was also involved in the early stages, so this program also assisted development of the Dassault Rafale)

– UK-Italy-Japan: Global Combat Air Programme

– France-Germany-Spain: Future Combat Air System

– USA-Norway: Joint Strike Missile

– USA-Germany: MBT-70, which fed into development of the M1 Abrams and the Leopard 2

Just like the 30s.