 Good afternoon by now, ladies and gentlemen. I was going to say anyway that what I'm about to do normally have to be minister, I think, to do this, to skip the entire conference, to show up at the end, and to pretend that you know it all and better than everybody else. But to then, in addition, arrive an hour late to have to be prime minister, or president, or king, I think, in our case. So apologies, truly. We boarded the aircraft on time, and then we sat for an hour or so on the runway. The official reason was clouds over Ireland, which is, of course, indeed, as I expected, an unprecedented fact could not possibly have been foreseen. But here we are. I wanted to draw on the Belgian example of military integration, a new example of army-to-army cooperation between Belgium and France to think about prospects, prospective roles for the armed forces of smaller nations, even though, officially, we at Egmond are not allowed to use that term and are a master sitting here right in front of me. So that is why I say that. I should add the usual caveat, though. Egmond is the thing that is closely linked with the Belgian foreign ministry. We're even physically inside the ministry since a few years. But mentally, we're allowed to roam outside. So I am not the spokesman for the king, whom I already mentioned. We are Royal Institute. So my starting point is this. I would say that at the global level, of course, all European states are small states. Not all of them are aware of it, but they are. But mostly, also, we think too small. And that, I think, is a mistake. It's not that long ago that we didn't. I was in senior high school. Belgium still fielded an entire army corps, the first and only Belgian corps in Germany, 80,000 troops in our land force. And like other NATO allies, all of them fielded that, a self-sufficient army corps. And each of these corps took its place in the line along the Iron Curtain. And they were supported by the multinational command structure, of course, and by some really specific multinational assets, such as the AOX aircraft. But apart from that, the building block was actually of multinational cooperation. The building block was actually the army corps. And of course, we abolished conscription, just in time for me to escape it, I shall add. Because much as I enjoy thinking about the military and lecturing to the military, I don't think I would have been very good in uniform myself. A man must know his limitations, said a great philosopher on the big screen. We were used to budgets, et cetera, et cetera. And the result is that now many European countries think really, really small. Belgium thinks of contributing to an operation in the UN, EU, NATO, or ad hoc context. A battalion is already an enormous deployment. That's a really big deployment. Very often when European states consider contributing to an operation, we think about, well, we might contribute a company. But that doesn't always work. So it could also be a half company. And that, I think, is totally not cost-effective. And often, also, it's operationally not as effective as it could be. So it seems to me that we have sort of gone too far. I'm, of course, not advocating to reintroduce conscription, now that I've escaped it, nor to reconstitute the Belgian Corps in Germany. But I'm thinking that we should reconsider the building block. If you accept my starting assumption that the solution to this fragmentation of our defense effort is integration, but then the building block should be bigger than what it is. The building block cannot be a company or cannot even a battalion, which is often told to be. If you think about European defense, many people speak about the EU battle groups, which are basically that sort of reinforced battalion, companies coming from different countries and the neighbors around it. You're not going to do much with a battalion. You're not going to do anything today with a battalion, with a single battalion in Libya or somewhere in Syria. So my argument is that the building block of our integration should be the brigade. This is a very army, land-centric talk, but luckily I see only two khaki uniforms in the room, hoping that there's no Navy or Air Force officers hiding in civis. There you go, by way of example. So I think that the building block should be the brigade. And it brings me to my second point. How could this work? Well, Belgium and France have just entered in a very far-reaching partnership between the, we call it, land component and the French Armée de Terre. We have one motorized brigade now in our land force, one special operations regiment, but that is not concerned here. NATO would like us to have a second brigade, and so with the land force commander. But the problem here is not so much money, but people. There are no recruits to manned two brigades, quite simply, even if we would have the money. So our single brigade, five battalions of motorized infantry, some combat support and combat service support units surrounded, but not all of them, which means that our brigade of good quality, though it is, and I'm convinced of that, is of limited use in many scenarios. For example, what we don't have or almost don't have is air defense. Well, then there's not so many places that you can go with your brigade if you lack air defense, because any guy these days can go to a supermarket and buy a drone that he can weaponize and use against you. So all these, most nations, except for a very small one, can still field one brigade, but very few of them have the full panoply of support units around it. So their usability is actually limited. What we are now going to do is one, to buy French vehicles. So the brigade will be entirely re-equipped with the new French vehicles. But we are also jointly developing the doctrine so that the French brigades and the one Belgian brigade will also use the same doctrine. And in the end, the aim is total and deep interoperability down to platoon level. Basically, the idea is that if you have three French guys in a vehicle and three Belgian guys in a Belgian vehicle, they should be able to swap and just carry on their business. That's the ideal. So this is really going very far. You could say that in a way, the Belgian brigade would become almost like a French brigade, but in Belgian uniform. My view is that you could then take this further, because if you would anchor our Belgian brigade permanently in a bigger French structure, the French maintain two divisions, for example, then you could organize the combat support and combat service support units at that level. You could say in some areas where the Belgians have nothing, you could say, OK, there is division of labor. And we trust on the French unit to take care of this particular function when we deploy on operations. In other areas, we have something, but it's perhaps not big enough to make it cost-effective to maintain it. But you could merge it, and you could create a permanent, bi-national support unit that supports, again, the brigades of either country when they deploy. And in this way, I think our brigade is still the same size, but suddenly it becomes a lot more employable. It is able to be used in a lot more scenarios. And that is, as I see it, the way head for integration. Now to please the Navy folks in the room of the R&E, this is exactly in a way of what we're doing, Belgium with the Netherlands. This is the same type of integration. But here, the building block, of course, is not battalion, but it's a ship. And we, Belgium has put in our two frigates and our, is it, five mine hunters into this cooperation. The building blocks remain national. So a ship sails under a Belgian flag and has a Belgian crew, or it sails under the Dutch flag with a Dutch crew. But everything behind it, either it does a division of labor, one nation does it for the two, or we have merged the support function. So this shows you that this can work. And I'm arguing within Belgium that we should look for a similar way of cooperation now, probably with the Netherlands also in our air force. Now that Belgium has also decided to buy the F-35. We're gonna have 34, the Dutch are gonna have 37, two almost equal forces. Does it make sense to organize an entire national air force around just 34 aircraft from an economic point of view? Again, I would say absolutely not. Especially not if, like we do in Belgium, you have to pretend that half of these, 17 of these F-35s would speak French and the other 17 would speak Flemish because that is how we do things, as you know. So then we split them over two bases. So I think you could easily say, okay, the building block is the squadron in this case, but a lot of the support structures around it, you could also merge. So this is how I see a way ahead where everybody's armed forces to regain some of the relevance that maybe we have lost. Now finally, to link this up to some of the existing international initiatives, first of all, in the EU. A lot is going on in European defense. I'm sure the other speakers have mentioned it. Notably PESCO, Promen Structural Corporation, but to be honest, quite skeptical that it's a really good tool that are we making good use of it? I doubt it. We have a plethora of projects, but if you look at all of those projects, they're about everything and nothing. There's absolutely no coherence. And I would dare to say that if you would implement all of these, we would actually still not be much more capable than we are today. And very few of them concern the real priority shortfalls in our militaries. It seems to me that the sense of purpose of PESCO has somewhat been lost. What is it actually for? It was supposed to be about much more than doing some joint equipment projects. In the original notification document, when member states announced their intention to activate PESCO, they said the objective could be, so not will be, could be to create, quote, a coherent full spectrum force package. That notion was not even copied into the council decision, which then activated it, even though it was in lots of the preparatory documents. But I think we should go back to the notion that is the purpose. There is one of the commitments that says that you should contribute strategically deployable formations, which to me also leads back to this idea of force packages. And there is one project in PESCO that tries to do exactly that. It's the project, as I always say, that in a hotly contested field, nonetheless wins the prize for worst acronym ever. This is the CROC, Crisis Response Operation Core. CROC Monsieur, CROC Madame, CROC Hawaii, if you're also coming in Belgium, if you want to be more exotic. But this is the idea to create a package of forces of permanently, units that are permanently anchored together to increase your deployability. So actually what is now happening between some countries on a bilateral basis, you could do it on a bigger scale and make this the central PESCO project. But then of course, you have to be sufficiently ambitious. And again, I'm not sure that we are in the initial Food for Tort paper that France and Germany submitted for this CROC. They, as always, there's a Churchill quote, there's a Churchill in 1943, sent a cable to the military, said we should stop inventing silly code names for operations. No parent wants to hear that Song has died on Operation Hully Blue or something. And the same goes for the actual units, I think. Nobody wants to be deployed on the CROC, I think. If in the military you want something more serious. Anyway, so the official Food for Tort paper was aiming at a force initially of one division and three or four brigades. And say, yeah, that is something that you could do, but then there was a feasibility study because more countries joined, there was a feasibility study and the result is not now because we are more in the CROC that the ambition has been lowered. So I think, oh, let's make a brigade. But we don't need that, Belgium has a brigade. So we don't need the EU to create one, we have one. So what we need is something bigger in which we can input our brigade. So I would say the model that I've sort of outlined is precisely what I think could be the purpose of the CROC, but then you have to think bigger. There can be more than one CROC within this CROC, right? Belgium and France are now doing this. Perhaps one or another country might be interested in joining that, but the Netherlands and Germany are also doing something very similar. And there is already a Dutch-German Army CORE also. So you have more than one CORE, there's have to be one. You could also have a certain role specialization in the sense that certainly the aim of the Franco-Belgian cooperation is expeditionary operations in the South. That's the priority. The German-Dutch CORE focus is a lot more also on territorial defense. So you could have at least two CORE, so there's something in it for everybody. And you could join what fits most closely with the orientation of your armed forces. So I think a lot is possible here if we make good use of it. The final issue that I want to bring up here is the link with another French initiative, the European Intervention Initiative, EI-2, where you have about a dozen or so countries now. Well, basically what the French are doing is creating a pool of willing allies, right? That's what they're doing. And there's a club of countries whom they assume have the will and the capacity to deploy for expeditionary operations. They created a couple of working groups on specific issues or specific regions. There's even a fun one as a Caribbean working group which the Netherlands are. We're in the Sahel working group, probably a bit less fun but important. And so the idea is that the smaller subsets them, they think, okay, if in which scenarios in our area that we discuss here, would we think that we need to act and what would we actually be willing to do? And then let's have a certain degree of pre-planning. I think that's very useful because it's something that we lack in the EU. There is, in my view, nowhere any clear strategic thinking in the EU context of why it is that we actually think we may have to use the force, especially, or we pretend stuff that actually is not really true. If you read the global strategy, it says that apparently the point of expeditionary operations is to protect people in other countries. But if you look at the reality of what we do, that's not what we do. If that's everything that, if that's the only thing that's at stake, yeah, then we should have bombed Nassat eight years ago. But we didn't, right? We only intervened when our security was at stake. We should be a bit more honest about this, probably, a bit sincere. And I think the sort of exercise that France has initiated in AI2 is really missing in our European thinking. I'm a bit out of say. I would have liked to see this within the EU. The French say, oh, we can't because we want to take the Brits on board and they cannot be in PESCO. But the only reason why they cannot be in PESCO is because the French don't want them to be in PESCO and block the decision on third country participation. But all right. But what I do think is that this thinking, if within this group they elaborate an idea of a K in which scenarios, what are we really willing to do? This should then shape the capability development that is ongoing. So for me, it would make sense that the EU member states that are in AI2, that they should also be in the CROC project and then shape the package that they think they need to act upon the ambitions that they are discussing. So to conclude, I think this could be small states thinking big again. No, at their own, but at a very realistic and reasonable level of defense investment. So it's not that we have to massively expand, but by anchoring what we have into each other's forces, I think that it can become a lot more employable, a lot more usable, both for expeditionary and for our territorial defense. And expeditionary, of course, in every possible context, be it United Nations, be it the EU, be it NATO and actually recent years, most expeditionary operations have taken part in ad hoc coalitions that is now the trend. So I thank you for your attention. My apologies again for my later iPhone. Thank you.