The Messina Bridge: Salvini’s Strategic Framing as a Military Asset
BRUSSELS — Italy has come under fire for mulling using a proposed €13.5 billion bridge to Sicily to count toward its defense spending — but the idea isn’t nonsense, the company in charge of the project told POLITICO.
“The Messina Strait Bridge project was developed from the outset to meet both civil traffic needs and the strategic mobility requirements of the Armed Forces,” said Stretto di Messina, the state-owned company holding the concession to design, build and operate the bridge.
The current design means that heavy military vehicles, such as tanks, will be able to cross the bridge once it is built, it added.
Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini said the government body responsible for approving large-scale projects will sign off on the bridge plan by the end of July.
Italy is a chronic NATO underspender, last year devoting only 1.49 percent of its gross domestic product to defense — well below the bloc’s old target of at least 2 percent of GDP. To make matters worse for Rome, the alliance last month agreed to a new target of 5 percent of GDP by 2035 to face off the growing threat posed by Russia.
That new goal is split into 3.5 percent of GDP for hard military spending on things like troops and tanks, and an additional 1.5 percent on defense-related investments like cybersecurity and military mobility.
Treating the Sicily bridge as military spending would allow Italy to more easily hit the 1.5 percent requirement.
The project would have to meet NATO criteria to qualify.
In a written reply to POLITICO, Stretto di Messina said the bridge aligns with the European Union’s Military Mobility Action Plan, which aims to strengthen the rapid movement of vehicles and military personnel across the continent within the Trans-European Transport Network, “of which the bridge is a part.”
Although it is not listed as one of its key components, the bridge is mentioned in the European project for the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor.
The company added that the project’s road dimensions meet NATO classification requirements “ensuring the safe transit of the heaviest military vehicles without requiring structural adjustments,” and that the railway would have the capacity to carry “heavy military convoys on standard flatbed wagons.”
Boondoggle or critical asset?
But critics say the span fails the test of being a military asset.
“I am not aware of any assessments that identify the Messina Strait [Bridge] as a critical infrastructure gap for NATO’s deterrence and defense, or for the EU’s security,” said Simon Van Hoeymissen, a researcher at the Brussels-based Royal Higher Institute for Defense, warning the scheme would have to make sense under NATO’s broader mission.
“An investment that one country makes in a project that, if taken in isolation, would be eligible to fall under the 1.5 percent, might not be militarily useful if other countries don’t make their own investments to embed that project in a coherent and useful corridor,” he added.
There is also a backlash in Italy over the idea that the long-planned bridge should have a military dimension.
More than 600 professors, researchers and university staff sent a letter earlier this month to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni calling the military aspects of the project a “lie.”
“We have witnessed a frenzied restyling of the image of the Messina Strait Bridge project, which, from a project of great importance for freight and passenger traffic, has suddenly become an essential and strategic military infrastructure, assertively ‘desired by Europe and NATO.’ This is an instrumental lie,” said the letter.
It added the bridge was “not designed and was never intended to be a military or dual-use” project, that there are no references to defense uses in earlier plans and that the military was not involved in the design.
The letter added that railway networks in southern Italy are not suited to transporting arms and ammunition, which make more sense to continue shipping by sea.
But the developer insisted that the military aspect is a core part of the scheme.
“The bridge over the Strait of Messina was designed as a dual-use infrastructure — which can be used for both civilian and military purposes,” it said.