There was a need to rebuild the department, hit by decades of budget cuts, with a critical drop in staff looming by 2024, she told an “evening lecture” hosted by the Center for Security and Defense Studies of the Royal Higher Institute for Defense (IRSD) in Brussels, two years following her arrival as the first woman at the head of Defense, in October 2019.
This is why the minister has drawn up various plans approved by the government: POP (“People Our Priority”, including initiatives for the benefit of defense personnel), on barracks – “with me the closing of quarters, it’s over”, she launched, recalling the planned construction of two “districts of the future in Charleroi and in East Flanders – and STAR for “Security, Technology, Ambition, Resilience”.
POP plans a “recapitalization” in the field of personnel – with 10,000 soldiers and several thousand civilians to be recruited by 2024 – and a significant salary increase.
As for the STAR plan, it plans to equip the army with new, high-tech equipment to make it “capable of dealing with current and future threats”, indicated the minister.
This plan, approved at the end of January by the government, includes a growing budgetary trajectory until 2030, with the objective of reaching military expenditure of 6.9 billion euros – once morest 4.2 this year – i.e. 1, 54% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), where NATO requires its members to devote 2% to it.
Investments in capacities represent 10.2 billion euros and the budget trajectory covers investments in capacities but also the basic envelope including operation – including the maintenance of new capacities – and personnel costs -, specified Ms Dedonder.
The De Croo team also approved at the end of March, on the eve of a NATO summit, an additional budget of one billion spread over the last three years of the legislature – 450 million euros in 2022 (i.e. 10 % of the annual budget), 275 in 2023 and 275 in 2024 – to replenish stocks due to the war in Ukraine.
