Fact sheet www.eda.europa.eu
EDA’s Pooling & Sharing: before and after Below, some examples of capabilities “today” and “tomorrow” (with Pooling & Sharing):
• the EU with its own SATCOM Capability Package to enable CSDP missions and operations.
Military Satellite Communication (MILSATCOM)
Air-to-air refueling
TODAY: Satellite-based communication for military and governmental purposes relies in Europe both on some national assets and on similar commercial means. In no cases the two solutions can be considered independent to each other, since the growing demand for bandwidth in operations leads even those proprietary Nations to revert to the commercial market to dispose of the needed capacities. Rather than accessing the commercial market in an uncoordinated way, EDA proposes to improve the value for money by pooling the demand and sets up a project named “ES¬CPC” – European SATCOM Procurement Cell – so far subscribed by four Member States (FR, IT, RO, UK). Turning to national MILSATCOM systems, the current aging assets call for a coordinated plan to provide for their replacement in order to avoid capability gaps in such an essential capacity. There is currently a window of opportunity to design the replacement of the 5 ex¬isting national governmental programmes (UK, FR, IT, DE, ES) by a collaborative approach fostering a true European interoperability. The decline of military budgets and the difficulty for each pMS to renew such dedicated national solutions suggest exploiting this opportunity. EDA is calling for a homogeneous generation of MILSATCOM and a European-wide access to resilient SATCOM. TOMORROW: The next generation of SATCOM requires to be designed through a shared approach. The balance between the need to rely on governmental owned systems and the possibility to access the commercial market has to be considered as a core driver. The lessons learned from ESCPC will bring clear and efficient trends. A common approach on future governmental owned systems would for example lead to the design of homogeneous “vehicle” – a generic satellite – thus saving on R&D, production and operations costs (order of magnitude €1Bn). Such a project would not only fill the requirement of today’s SATCOM nations but would also provide: • non-MILSATCOM nations and European institutional users (e.g. EEAS) with resilient governmental SATCOM
TODAY: characterized by a huge shortfall in Europe (20% of Libya sor¬ties – similar figures for Kosovo) and huge fragmentation (too many types – microfleets) of the European capacities resulting in an even more reduced overall efficiency (both from an op¬erationnal and cost point of view). TOMORROW: The fragmentation will gradually be reduced by the progres¬sive phasing out of old aircraft and the fielding of common versatile/multirole platforms which will also contribute to cargo and passenger transport. MS additional acquisition will be pooled and will be established in order to secure as much synergies as possible with the already contracted replacement solutions: A400m and A330 MRTT. In addition fleet optimisation will be pursued through existing (MCCE, EATC) or new mechanisms. Finally short term gap filling solutions will be offered to MS.
Medical support TODAY: Medical support to multinational operations is a prerequisite to multinational solutions. The issue is twofold: a) The experience shows that multinational medical support is better suited for multinational contingent b) The burden in terms of availability and sustainability needs to be better shared. TOMORROW: the future Modular Multinational Medical Unit relies on a matrix of Framework Nations willing/able to take on the role of supplying all non-medical directly related roles: command, support, mobility, communications, infrastructure and of Contributing Nations willing to take on supplying one of the different medical modules (or sub-modules). The Lead Nation takes also the responsibility to organise pre-deployment force integration in case of an operations. In case of an operation the matrix allows to tailor the med support M3U to any political framework (EU, NATO, UN, adhoc coalition) and any operational environment (possible Host Nation Support, tactical environment).
Last update: 30/04/2012