Minister Ionut Mosteanu expressed his hope, on Tuesday, that the draft law on the preparation of the population for defense will be adopted next week by the Senate.
„Today I was at the Senate Defense Committee for a debate on the draft law on the preparation of the population for defense, that project that we want as an army, as a Ministry of Defense, a project that is meant to rejuvenate the operational reserve of the Romanian Army, a project through which young people between 18 and 35 years old will be able to do voluntary military training, I emphasize, and then it will be remunerated and then they will enter the operational reserve of the Romanian Army. There are some discussions on this project. In the two weeks since it passed the Chamber of Deputies until today, we also had discussions in the ministry,” declared Mosteanu, in Parliament.
He added that current legislation – Law 270/2015 – provides for „a voluntary reserve”, people who have undergone training and are then remunerated monthly to be at the disposal of the Romanian Army.
„The draft started out as a good idea, but, unfortunately, the execution was not brilliant and we ended up with this project not being very efficient in terms of the resource that the Romanian Army wants and in terms of financial sustainability. A project that ended up costing 170 million lei per year for 4,700 volunteers, some of whom were already people who had military obligations, which is not right. We established that a part of this voluntary reserve will remain and we will modify this old law in order to keep and train some people and keep them as an operational, voluntary reserve, in certain specialties, which cannot be covered by the military reserve that comes from the ranks of the Army and the institutions of the national defense system. There were some good discussions, my colleagues remained there, „They are still discussing amendments. Next week I hope it will pass the Senate so that this project becomes law before the budget law, so that we can budget for next year,” the minister explained.AGERPRES
