European corvette, the Project Team meets in Rome

(To Marina Militare)
09/03/22

The meeting of the Project Team of EPC in attendance, dedicated to the European Patrol Corvette project, a class of second-line naval units designed in coordination with some of the EU Navies and which will be built by an industrial consortium consisting of four companies from three different countries, including the Italian giant Fincantieri.

Representatives of the Italian Navy, Spain, France, Greece and the European Defense Agency (EDA) attended the meeting.

The meeting, dedicated to the drafting of the common requirements, was fundamental to further develop the capacitive development document underlying the project and to seal the convergence of intentions of the four countries in order to make the project certainly feasible by the industrial consortium.

The project  European Patrol Corvette (EPC) is part of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), or the structured international cooperation of the European Union in the defense sector. In particular, EPC is a project proposed by the Italian Navy, supported by the Ministry of Defense and approved by the European Commission on 12 November 2019.

The initiative, born following the signing on June 3, 2019 of a joint letter of intent with the French Navy, aroused the interest of several nations which subsequently expressed their intention to join as a participant Member State. To date, Italy (as coordinator), France, Greece, Spain and Portugal (as observer) are therefore involved.

Thanks to the support ofEuropean Defense Agency (Eda), institutional contact person for the phase of definition and harmonization of the common requirements, a convergence was found for the drafting of the initial plant documents with the aim of establishing the development lines of the entire program.

The European corvette will be a patrol-type military ship, endowed with remarkable qualities of flexibility, capable of carrying out multiple missions and therefore both "presence and surveillance" tasks and those with a "combat" profile.

The goal is to pursue ever greater synergy and optimization for the development of the maritime instrument and, at the same time, overcome the fragmentation that characterizes the EU today, where there are more than 30 types of unit classes (from 500 to 4000 tons).

After the meeting on March 8, the next ones step are those of the initiation of the national approval process ofOperational need to seal the results achieved and continue with the design process by defining the detailed requirements.

The contract for the construction of the European corvettes could be signed as early as 2025 and the setting up of the first ship could take place in 2026 with delivery starting from 2030.