P. Gajdoš: Slovakia is an active NATO member, this is reflected in our participation in the Allianceʼs current activities geared towards stability and peace building

 
On NATOʼs Defence Investment Pledge, SVK Minister of Defence Peter Gajdoš said: “I was immensely pleased that in front of our Allies I could today once again declare Slovakiaʼs ambition to increase our defence spending up to 1.6 per cent of GDP by 2020 and 2 per cent of GDP by 2024.” The Minister added that the MODʼs ambition is to keep within and above the existing guideline of spending 20 percent of the defence budget on modernisation.
 
When it comes to the performance of Slovakiaʼs international commitments arising out of its NATO membership, SVK personnel will remain in the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. In addition, SVK specialists also continue to be on the ground in Iraq to train and build the capacities of the Iraqi Security Forces in the field of demining, which will be extended to incorporate maintenance and repairs of military hardware. “Our next activity is the deployment of our troops to the Baltics, which is scheduled for this year already, whereas they will deploy to Latvia for so-called enhanced Forward Presence under the command of Canada. For this purpose, the Ministers of all Allies involved met in a separate session to discuss our joint engagement in Latvia,” said the Minister.
 
NATO Defence Ministers agreed, among other things, the design of an adapted NATO Command Structure, to further improve its flexibility and rapid response to the crisis situations and security threats the Alliance is currently faced with.
 
Todayʼs meeting will be concluded with a late evening session on ways to ensure follow-up cooperation between NATO and the EU, with the participation of High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini. Key topics of discussion will include taking stock of the implementation of the EU-NATO Joint Declaration strengthening the EU-NATO strategic partnership and the EUʼs resonating security and defence initiatives in the form of PESCO. “I am pleased that on this subject matter we have something to be proud of, I mean we have our own Indirect Fire Support project, also known as EuroArtillery, where we achieved our first success – the project made it onto the final list of the first collaborative PESCO projects. In this context, let me remind that just last week we organised a conference on this theme in Slovakia, with the participation of European Defence Agency (EDA) officials, specialists from Italy and from another 7 countries interested in the project,” said Minster Gajdoš.