FOU, Alm.del - 2010-11 (1. samling) - Bilag 132: Afrapportering til Folketingets Europaudvalg vedr. EU forsvarsministermøde den 23 maj 2011

Council conclusions on pooling and sharingof military capabilities3091st FOREIGN AFFAIRS Council meetingBrussels, 23 May 2011The Council adopted the following conclusions:"1.Following its December 2010 Conclusions, the Council reiterates the need to turn thefinancial crisis and its impact on national defence budgets into an opportunity for greatercooperation in the area of capability development. It welcomes the High Representative’sinterim report on CSDP/"Military Elements" as an important contribution to this end.The Council calls for a structured and long-term approach to pooling and sharing, based on ahigh level of ambition, in a wide array of capability areas, and leading to concrete results.While shorter-term quick-win initiatives can have a useful stimulating effect, the Councilencourages Member States to apply pooling and sharing on a systematic and sustainable basis,promoting multinational cooperation, including on a regional basis, as a key method topreserve and develop military capabilities in Europe for sustaining and enhancing CSDP.In this context, the Council welcomes the initial inputs and findings from Member States’national analyses as a first step towards enhanced transparency among Member States andmore pooling and sharing initiatives. These initial findings, collected and compiled by the EUMilitary Committee supported by the Military Staff, have shown opportunities in a variety ofareas, including research and technology, procurement, maintenance, logistics, education andtraining. As part of this effort, the Council stresses the need to further explore rolespecialization.The Council, while reiterating the Member States’ driving role in defining and committingvoluntarily to concrete pooling and sharing projects, stresses the added value of work at theEU level to support and foster this, taking advantage of the political momentum, notably bymapping ongoing and forthcoming cooperation, identifying best practices, models forcooperation and criteria for success, and developing other supporting tools and providingexpertise in other areas such as interoperability and standardisation as part of the workundertaken by various EU bodies.

The Council also encourages the European Defence Agency to continue to contribute to thiswork by further supporting participating Member States in identifying opportunities forpooling and sharing, including through senior-level external support offered by participatingMember States on a voluntary basis, and analysing its potential industrial implications. Itwelcomes the intention of the Agency to submit proposals to that end.5.The Council welcomes close contacts with NATO on pooling and sharing, including staff-to-staff contacts. It underlines the need to pursue such contacts in order to ensure coherence.The Council welcomes the engagement of individual Member States to develop, on the basisof the proposals and ideas put forward, further pooling and sharing initiatives by extendingexisting projects to other partners and/or by setting up new cooperative projects, also buildingon the commitment by the national Chiefs of Defence to establish multilateral contacts to thatend.The Council will examine progress and achievements on a regular basis, first in the autumn of2011, including on the basis of the High Representative's forthcoming report on CSDP and ofinputs by Member States. As part of this, the Council will consider an extraordinary session atministerial level where Member States could declare their intentions with regard to newcooperative initiatives."____________________