More Allies join NATO’s multinational capability cooperation initiatives

National Armaments Directors from 18 NATO Allies and the General Manager of the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) reaffirmed their commitment to work together to develop, acquire and store capabilities in a way that’s cheaper, improves access to state-of-the art military technology, and makes Allies more interoperable.

Photo by Belgian MOD

This was done in the margins of the spring meeting of the National Armament Directors at NATO HQ on 28 April 2022. There, Allies welcomed new participants to three High Visibility Projects: the “Modular Ground Based Air Defence” (Modular GBAD) project, the “Command and Control capability for surface-based air and missile defence for the battalion and brigade level” initiative (SBAMD C2 Layer), and the “Multinational Ammunition Warehousing Initiative” (MAWI).

France joined Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States in the GBAD project, which aims to develop a modular solution for very short range, short range and medium range ground-based air defence. This capability will improve Allies’ ability to protect NATO’s skies from a wide range of threats.

For the second project, six Allies – Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the US – welcomed France and Hungary to the initiative. They will work together to obtain a Command and Control capability for surface-based air and missile defence for the battalion and brigade level (SBAMD C2 Layer). Again, this will contribute to NATO’s air defences, as well as to the interoperability of Allied forces.

Finally, the participants of the Multinational Ammunition Warehousing Initiative (Belgium, Estonia, France, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia and Spain) welcomed Slovenia and the NSPA to the project. The long-term ambition here is to change the way NATO Allies and partners store and distribute munition stockpiles. This will free up resources for other defence purposes. A first warehousing solution already opened in March 2022 in Estonia; it supports NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence (eFP), and is open to all Allies participating in this mission.