Brussels, 11/02/2003 (Agence Europe) - An informal meeting bringing together the directors for strategic affairs of the defence ministries of Member States was held on 10 February to discuss the state of the EU's military capabilities. The experts examined two aspects in particular: the Franco-British proposal of setting up an Agency for the development and procurement of defence capabilities "Capabilities Agency", as announced at the Franco-British Summit of Le Touquet on 4 February (see EUROPE of 6 February, p.5), and a working paper by the Greek Presidency on setting up working groups responsible for acting on the solutions proposed by the panels working on the EU's shortcomings regarding military capabilities, that are to report on 1 March.
The "Capabilities Agency" only being a project at this stage, the Franco-British document simply identifies the different tasks it could be allocated: notably, identifying the EU's quantitative and qualitative goals regarding military capabilities, harmonise the EU's military capabilities, co-ordinate technological research in the matter and propose common procurement solutions.
The participants also studied the paper by the Greek Presidency on the follow-up to the work over the EU's military shortcomings. For nigh-on eight months now, 17 panels have been working on 24 significant shortcomings of the EU among the 42 identified so as to propose short- and long-term solutions to hedge against these EU shortcoming temporarily, while waiting to be able to implement long-term solutions (see EUROPE of 21 November, p.6). The reports by these panels will be analysed with a view to establishing, at the inter-ministerial conference on the EU's military capabilities scheduled for May, a new catalogue of capabilities for 2003 ("Headline Force Catalogue 2003"), setting out the shortcomings and solutions proposed. Once approved by the General Affairs Council (probably of 19 and 20 May), this catalogue will serve as basis for national experts spread into different working groups to implement the solutions identified by co-ordinating their know-how and technology (a working group could bring together experts from different countries but having chosen to resolve a specific problem in the same manner - for example, remedy the lack of attack helicopters by transforming existing helicopters).