Defense

With 1.4% of GDP, Slovenia still spends significantly less for military than the 2.0% committed for NATO membership. Our military today consists of around 7300 active troops of mainly ground forces and a small navy. As a comparatively small nation, we can only achieve deterrence with a well organised, educated and equipped military. Still, there are limits to what we can achieve alone, and in today’s geopolitical context, we will have to cooperate with our European and NATO partners for a joint approach. Interoperability therefore becomes paramount and with the frequent calls for European defence, our efforts should focus towards making Slovenia an integral part of a joint European Defence initiative.

Volt Slovenia proposes:

Investments

• Increase our military spending to 2% of GDP by focussing on the improvement of our railway infrastructure which can help with rapid deployment but also has a dual use to complement  and improve our existing railway network.

Procurement

• Seek at least one additional EU member state to launch an initiative for joint procurement across all domains for both cost transparency and to allow Slovenian defence companies to meet the conditions for benefiting from funding available in the EDF (European Defence Fund - requires joint procurement from at least two EU member states for development actions).

• Commit to purchasing NATO standard equipment from Slovenian and European suppliers to ensure our Defence budget benefits the national and European defence sector. For all other sourced equipment, introduce a condition that Slovenian companies have to be put in a position to independently provide service, maintenance and spare parts.

Specialisation

• Identify a specific terrain (e.g. alpine) and types of offensive (eg drones) and defensive (eg ground-to-air defence) warfare which are suitable for Slovenia and our existing military industrial base. Try to develop European leadership in these chosen domains through specialised training and programmes as well as dedicated R&D initiatives. We should know everything, but be specialists in some disciplines.

Cooperation

• Set a path to fully integrate Slovenian military into the future EU Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) that is set to replace EU Battlegroups. European defence should see 27 independent militaries converge into a joint military force. We should prepare and invest in Slovenia’s role within such a joint European defence instead of maintaining duplicate and possibly redundant structures.

• Ensure that our military forces integrate with NATO and EU defence programmes and that our troops actively participate in joint training initiatives abroad to begin to adapt to multinational and multi-stakeholder environments.

(version 2025-02)