EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton presented the Commission proposal this week for producing one million shells for Ukraine in 12 months.
The Commission will launch a 500-million-euro fund, taken from European Social Fund moneys, to be “leveraged” by private investors. Governments can also use Recovery Fund money to finance the plan, he suggested.
In order to solve industry bottlenecks, Breton suggested running production around the clock, lifting restrictions on night shifts.
“Certain member states have expressed their requirements and have come up with plans to speed things up,” Breton said according to Euractiv, without specifying which ones have done so.
“We can use the European Social Fund. When talking about a war economy, we’re trying to find solutions, we are thinking out of the box.”
Breton mentioned the example of COVID-19 vaccines production, which was strained, and the decision to “set up a sort of skills pool and set up partnerships with skills transfers, to help us speed up in this transition period” when “we needed to mobilize skills, to share skills from one member state to another.” “Some of the [defense] industries very much worked on a silo basis and didn’t really see what was going on next door,” he added.
Opposition forces in Italy warned against the use of Recovery Fund money for arms production, but government forces replied that such funds are earmarked for projects already and that it would be difficult to change that.
