In a report dated Monday 15 July, the European Commission concluded that the implementation of the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) was satisfactory.
ASAP, with a budget of €500 million, aims to strengthen the responsiveness and capacity of the European defence technological and industrial base to ensure the timely supply of munitions and missiles in Europe.
“The implementation of ASAP has demonstrated that an emergency instrument in the field of industrial defence works and that competitive calls for specific industrial needs can be put in place with full publication of the calls for proposals and including the regular comitology process used in other similar programmes”, summarised the Commission in a report to the Member States. Going on to add: “The ASAP regulation is a very good demonstration of the Commission’s ability to act urgently and in full compliance with the legal framework”.
In its opinion, the targeted industrial community, in the artillery ammunition sector, was able to respond on time with complete proposals, making full use of all the options in the regulation and the work programme, such as the bonus system, the various eligible activities, and retroactivity. “The 31 projects selected for ASAP funding provide a good basis for achieving the political goals of the Regulation and, more importantly, substantially increasing the production capacity of artillery shells and missiles and their respective supply chains” the Commission said.
However, it recommended, among other things, that in drafting the regulations, efforts should be made to establish clear links between policy objectives and planned activities. In addition, “simplicity should guide and, to all possible extent, govern the drafting of the regulation, notably in terms of number of award criteria and complexity of the funding mechanisms”, it proposed.
The Commission also considered that a preliminary survey and in-depth knowledge of the industrial production capacity for a given defence product were essential in order to identify the most appropriate structure for the work programme, so that the investments sought could be concentrated as effectively as possible on the bottlenecks where they would have the greatest impact.
See the report: https://aeur.eu/f/d1w (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)