Italian Government
Minister Crosetto at the "Defense Summit 2025 – A Safer and More Secured Italy"
"The great difficulty of contemporary security is that traditional threats don't disappear. They accumulate, layer, and coexist with new ones, which are increasingly pervasive, rapid, and difficult to predict. We can reduce the risks, but the exponential growth of technology makes everything more complex.
In this scenario, politics—real politics—has a crucial task: to intercept the factors that can evolve into conflicts. Wars don't arise out of nowhere; they mature within imbalances we don't address. Consider inequality: a world in which the rich become richer and those who have little become poorer is unsustainable. It is a betrayal of the democratic promise. When democracy doesn't improve people's lives, it enters into crisis, while autocracies advance, exploiting these loopholes at a faster rate than we can.
This is also why a comprehensive reorganization of Defense is needed: a model capable of facing tomorrow's challenges and, above all, of changing at the speed required by the present. The proposal I will bring to Parliament is clear: a Defense that can adapt to situations, with adequate rules capable of ensuring an ecosystem An integrated system in which industry, universities, research centers, and defense work in synergy. We have extraordinary energy to do this, but we also have an internal adversary: the bureaucratic barriers that block and stifle expertise. They must be overcome. Because today, speed and capability no longer guarantee victory: they guarantee the survival of the system.
Defense can be the driving force of this change, positively influencing other institutions. It has a dual responsibility: to protect the country today and to build the path that will guarantee the nation's future. We are all involved in this challenge: defense, industry, research, and universities. It is a shared responsibility.
If we don't act now, with awareness and urgency, we will leave our children a worse country. And we cannot allow this." These were the words of Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, speaking at the closing of the Defense Summit 2025 - "A Safer and More Protected Italy" at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.
