A Defence Sustainment Act in 2023... or more of the same

The insistent voices calling on the Spanish government to undertake a multi-annual Defence Endowments Act are once again being heard loud and clear as the events of the war in Ukraine awaken the interest and concern of Spaniards for the safeguarding of their freedoms and living conditions.

They are repeatedly voiced in forums in which MPs, senior government officials and managers of the Spanish defence industry are invited to participate, where points of view are exchanged and national security and defence are debated without political interests taking precedence in the Defence Committees of the Congress and Senate.

There is a clear insistence on demanding sustainable defence budgets over time, a request that is made privately and in restricted spheres by the senior commanders of the Spanish Armed Forces and, in public, by the managers of the national industry that is responsible for producing and sustaining national military capabilities.

The aim of such a law would be to build a financial architecture that would allow for staggered and continuous investments for the programmed and rational renewal of the increasingly costly and efficient -due to their high technological component- equipment and weapons systems used by the military. Also to improve their living and service conditions at home and abroad.

Politicians and senior officials in the Spanish Defence Department have been aware for years of the urgent importance of making the aforementioned Law a reality. But so far they have limited themselves to making a face of circumstances, stammering "everything will work out", "we'll see" or "we're working on it" and letting time run out waiting for who knows what. But the security environment around Spain, Europe and the West is now in the midst of restructuring and it is time to take control.

Most MPs and senators, senior government officials and business leaders agree on the need - rather than the desirability - to establish sooner rather than later a stable budgetary framework covering at least five to six years. Of course, with review clauses, for example, on a biennial basis, to facilitate adaptation to geostrategic and macroeconomic developments. 

There are already concordant views among several parliamentary groups. The president of the Congressional Defence Committee (José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro) and the spokespersons of the PSOE (Zaida Cantera), the PP (Fernando Gutiérrez Díaz de Otazu), Ciudadanos (Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez Vivas) and VOX (Agustín Rosety) express their support for the measure and argue very similar positions -although, as is evident, with differentiating nuances - in their speeches in Parliament and in the seminars and conferences they regularly attend to discuss defence and national security issues. 

The distances on the content of such a possible law are not insurmountable. Their perceptions are to a high degree common, even with the approaches argued by industry, so that a policy of consensus and the goodwill of the parties is capable of overcoming the nuances that separate one from the other. Our two neighbours in the European Union, France and Portugal, have such a law. There is a reason for this.

At a recent forum on the importance of defence in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the president of the Spanish Association of Defence, Security, Aeronautics and Space Technology Companies (TEDAE), Ricardo Martí Fluxá, called for the umpteenth time for "a great state pact between parties to see how we invest defence budgets over the next 10 years".

"We cannot depend on annual budgets, that creates insecurity," he stressed, "because the high-tech projects we are dealing with are long-term projects". "Now is the time to take a step forward. It's now or never," he stresses. His words are in line with those of the Elcano Royal Institute's senior researcher, Mila Milosevich, for whom "we are living through the end of the European security system and the reconfiguration of the world order, in which the war in Ukraine is an accelerator".

Enacting a multi-year Defence Sustainment Law is no easy task. In Spain, one obstacle to overcome is the composition of the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition government and the unstable balance of political forces in Congress, as well as the PSOE's complexes regarding military affairs. 

Within the coalition parties of the current Executive there are tendencies whose position, barring surprises, is not in favour of the aforementioned law. And to complicate the scenario, there are political formations that are radically opposed to anything that has to do with improving Spain's military capabilities.

These groups are anchored in outdated prejudices and myths, to which they cling like limpets, and so they tend to decline to attend and ignore any invitations to express their views. The majority are Catalan and Basque separatist politicians and the ultra-left and anti-establishment parties.  

Why do we need a multi-year regulatory financial framework exclusively for Defence? In short, to rationally carry out the continuous reconfiguration of the Armed Forces, raise their technological capabilities and improve the availability rates of the most critical weapons systems. This is a recurring demand of the Armed Forces and the national industrial fabric, because the absence of such a regulation has been causing fluctuations in the annual budgets allocated to the Ministry of Defence, which have repercussions on the operational capacity of the Force, no matter how much the politicians try to disguise it.

The president of the company Tecnobit, Luis Furnells, is one of the directors who is fighting hardest for a law that allows defence investments to be programmed in the long term, in order to "create certainty for companies and investors" and not in the short term, as the Ministry of Defence has been doing until now. "High technology is not improvised, it requires planning", stressed Furnells. "We generate knowledge, dual-use technologies and we acquire talent from universities, but we need to invest in innovation and in programmes that provide us with national and European sovereignty". 

The popular proverb "Obras son amores, y no buenas razones" and the comedy of the same name by Lope de Vega are an exhortation to the coherence that must exist between the facts and the fine words that our political representatives wield on the subject. As the international scene stands, the time has come to distinguish between the mediocre managers of public resources and those who, as the Duke of Wellington said, are able to glimpse "what is behind the hill"... although some do not even see what is right under their noses and are more at home on one visit after another.