The European Union needs its own armed forces to ensure its security, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell writes in his blog.

“The new security environment demonstrates that the EU needs to take on more responsibility for its own security. For this, we need modern and interoperable European armed forces, looking at the higher-end of the spectrum and also striving to scale up capabilities and forces.

The European Union needs to work kin three basic directions. Member states must.

First, work on the combat readiness of forces, including on stockpile replenishment.

Second, augment existing capabilities, quantitatively and qualitatively (mass and volume), within the next five years with a focus on gaps accumulated from the past, such as strategic enablers, modernisation of air defences, cyber and space-based capabilities, just to name a few.

Third, in a longer period, develop jointly future key capabilities such as Main Battle Tanks, advanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities or Space Situational Awareness.

"The time to push forward European defence is now. We need to strengthen the European defence industrial base and to be operational with the needed military capacities. To be able to increase our military capacity to defend ourselves, to make the NATO stronger and to support better our partners whenever needed”, - writes Borrell.