Spain may join Italian and French new 3 000 ton corvette programme along with Greece. Italy and France want to win European Union funding for the construction of a new corvette. The program dubbed the European Patrol Corvette which is part of the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO. PESCO is one pan-European defence programs recommendations to bridge capability gaps collaboratively.

The new naval, joint venture between Italy’s Fincantieri and France’s Naval Group is named Naviris.

Naviris aims to match Italian and French navy requirements with a jointly built, modular vessel that can handle patrol and surveillance missions as well as taking second-tier roles in anti-submarine and anti-surface missions.

Greece has also joined as a partner, following discussions between the countries’ navies. And now Spain is likely to follow.

On its PESCO listing for the corvette, the EU states “the objective is to design and develop a prototype for a new class of military ship, named “European Patrol Corvette” (EPC), which can host several systems and payloads, to accomplish, with a modular and flexible approach, a large number of tasks and missions.”