PRESS

Under new austerity measures, Italy will reduce its
defense budget by €3 billion over the next 3 years. 5
ITALY’S STRATEGIC VISION
Any analysis of Italian grand strategy faces one
overriding difficulty: there is no systematic production
by the government of national-level strategy
papers. To the extent that strategic documents have
been issued, more often than not, they have been at
the initiative of individual ministers rather than an established
policy planning process.
That said, there have been various government
papers issued over the past decade that allow one to
tease out Italy’s strategic ambitions, and the military—
the government believes—is required to obtain them.
The most relevant documents of this sort have been
the 2001 defense ministry’s New Forces for a New Century;
the post–September 11, 2001 (9/11) Defense White
Paper, issued by the ministry in 2002; the 2005 Defense
Chief of Staff’s Strategic Concept paper; the defense
staff’s 2005 Investing in Security: The Armed Forces, An
Evolving Tool; and the defense ministry’s annual Addendum
to the Defense Budget, which attempts to give
strategic and political context to the approved budget,
as well as provide details on specific accounts within
the budget.
The 2001 document was the first formal paper of
its kind produced by the Italian defense ministry since
the end of the Cold War—indeed, it was the first since
the mid–1980s. 6 The paper notes the obvious but important
point that Italy will not be facing a conventional
military threat to its homeland anytime soon.
But it couples that fact with the assertion that Italy’s
interests are “quite broad,” ranging from Southeast-
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