00:00The Chinese defence minister gave this dialogue a miss for a second year in a row.
00:05What do you make of that? What messaging do you think we should take away from that?
00:08Well, it's a pleasure to be here. And for me, once again, it's not the first time being here in
00:13Shangri-La.
00:14It's my first time I've seen Chinese delegations on big numbers and also on small numbers.
00:23What it's important for me is always that the dialogue is keeping up, that we are able to talk, that
00:30we are able to communicate.
00:32The size of the Chinese delegation is very small this time and it's also very low ranked.
00:39So I think China is missing an opportunity here to talk, to talk within the region, but also to other
00:49partners, to other militaries, to other politicians.
00:52Let's talk about Europe. He was pretty critical of Europe. He was praising the Asian allies.
00:58I guess the numbers don't really add up because Europe has ramped up its defence spending.
01:04What else do you think Europe can do to kind of bridge the gap and perhaps reverse that relationship with
01:09the U.S.?
01:10Well, hearing the speech from Secretary Hexert yesterday, I was probably leaning a little bit back, only a little bit,
01:19because what he offers as limits, as lines where we have to go, I must say we are fulfilling this
01:30with the German military,
01:31with the German army. So the defence spending in Germany is at this stage.
01:35We are ramping up enormously. When Secretary Hexert last year was here, he was talking about, well, even Germany is
01:46doing this.
01:47Well, we understood. We understood the message. We understood what we have to do.
01:52And it's not only Germany, it's also other countries.
01:56Are you concerned about capabilities gap? We know that Europe has said that it will be able to defend itself
02:01by the end of the decade.
02:03I'm just wondering, in the meantime, where are the vulnerabilities? Where are the capabilities gaps?
02:09Some say nuclear could be an area.
02:11For me, it's important that we are in a dialogue about this. So when we are talking about capabilities, we
02:17need a roadmap.
02:18It's clear that the U.S. is seeing their main effort now here in this region.
02:24But what we have to do is, if they're taking capabilities out, we have to mitigate those capabilities.
02:31So it has to be clear, it has to be transparent, and there has to be a roadmap in what
02:35time frame we have to do.
02:36So this is a kind of a little bit of a European dilemma. What we are facing, we have all
02:42understood that we have to take care of our security on our own,
02:46that we have to take over more responsibility, but we can't build up the needed capabilities that fast like it
02:54is necessary.
02:54So this process has to be designed, it has to be steered on this priority.
02:59It's ISR, which is on top of the list. It's capabilities in the airspace. It's capability in space.
03:09It's, of course, air defense, what is in there. It's digitalization, where we have to get much more ahead of
03:20what we are doing.
03:21So multi-domain operations comes to mind. It's deep precision strike weapons or long-range fires.
03:27So this is the top priority, if you will. So, but, you know, I'm a little bit reluctant to talk
03:34about priorities,
03:35because priorities, when you set priorities, you probably don't look into what is necessary.
03:42So we have an underspending in defense budget over years and years.
03:47So we have to fill the gap to build up a baseline and then starting from there.
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