European Union Standards

• On this basis, the Commission proposed three lines of action: i) inviting industrial circles to draw up a work programme for identifying standards; ii) a regular exchange system on standards between the EU and NATO; and iii) providing Commission support to standardization organizations while incorporating the specificities of the defence sector.

  Following a study commissioned in 1999 (the so-called ‘Sussex Study’), the European Commission pushed for greater standardization efforts within the EU. One of the major conclusions and recommendations from the Sussex Study was that the EU should work with ESOs to develop a ‘European Defence Standardization Handbook”. The Commission took on board this suggestion and developed a Handbook on defence procurement that identified and compiled more than 10,000 relevant standards in specific technical domains. However, despite the creation of the Handbook the Commission soon turned towards ways in which standards could be taken up by Member European armaments standardization States.

  Indeed, in its 2007 Strategy for a Stronger and More Competitive European Defence Industry, the Commission stated that in order to overcome fragmentation of the European defence market by reduced barriers to cooperation and avoiding wasteful R&D, it is necessary to ‘promote the use of common standards to facilitate the opening up of defence markets’.

  This focus, and the maturation of the Handbook, saw the Commission transfer the initiative over to the EDA in June 2011. The Agency further developed the Handbook as an online database called the European Defence Standards Reference System. The EDSTAR database sat alongside another EDA initiative that had been developed in 2007 called the European Defence Standards Information System. As web-based platforms, the idea behind both EDSIS and EDSTAR is to exchange information on defence standards, to allow stakeholders to advertise relevant standards, to promote networking among these stakeholders and to effectively utilize published standards.

  The key difference between EDSIS and EDSTAR is that EDSIS lists existing standards and it gives stakeholders the opportunity to amend existing or volunteer new standards, whereas EDSTAR is a platform that assists stakeholders implement and use existing standards. Since 2007, EDSIS has recorded 147 published defence-relevant standards and 89 standards are still active – of these 89 active standards, 20 are brand new whereas the remaining 69 are revisions of existing standards.

  The standards registered in EDSIS range from a basic standard for cables and insulated wires to packaging for ammunition and explosives to standards for methanol fuel cell systems. While the EDA does not develop defence standards itself, the EDSTAR platform currently lists more than 2 400 defence-relevant standards ranging from high-resistant paints and varnishes to electro technical vocabulary.

  As part of the EDSTAR initiative, the EDA’s participating Member States sit in the Materiel Standardization Group (MSG) format and the group is chaired by the EDA’s Armaments Director. The MSG oversees the state of play of defence standardization in an EU context and it has the opportunity to make new standardization requests and proposals.

  EDSTAR is organized according to various technical domains including ammunition; armored land vehicle technology; camouflage; electrical interfaces; electromagnetic environments; lifecycle project management; military airworthiness; and many more. Finally, to aid the Agency’s work and to assist with the efforts of the MSG, there is an in-house body within the EDA called the Materiel Standardization Harmonization Team (MSHT), which provides advice and expertise to ESOs on defence standardization.

  After the commissioning of the ‘Sussex Study’ and the development of the defence standardization handbook, the European Commission continued to develop a number of policy and legal instruments designed to enhance armaments standardization. For example, following the adoption of the directive on defence procurement (see 2009/81/EC) in 2009, the European Commission made clear in recital 38 of the directive that the use of standards and technical specifications are to be considered a precondition for defence procurement tenders.

  According to the Commission, the use of standards is a way of overcoming ‘incompatibility or disproportionate technical difficulties in operation and maintenance’. In particular, the Commission makes clear that ‘technical specifications shall afford equal access for tenderers and shall not have the effect of creating unjustified obstacles to the opening up of procurement to competition’. In this respect, the Commission sees the defence procurement directive as a way to enhance armaments standardization by challenging the principle of national discrimination during defence contract tendering.

  Furthermore, the purpose of Directive 2009/43/EC on defence equipment transfers is designed to provide the market conditions for greater standardization while maintaining a level playing field in the European defence market.

Building on this logic, on 24 July 2013 the Commission released a Communication spelling out how Europe could head towards a more competitive and efficient defence and security sector (see COM(2013) 542 final). In the Communication the Commission makes clear that it will develop a defence industrial policy based in part on developing hybrid standards to ‘benefit security and defence markets’.  

The Communication shows how most ‘standards used in EU defence are civilian’ but where ‘specific defence standards are required they are developed nationally, hindering co-operation and increasing costs for the industry’. On this basis, the Commission stated that one of the action points derived from the Communication is to promote hybrid standards for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive materials (CBRNE), RPAS, airworthiness, data sharing, encryption and critical information communication technologies.

The Commission’s planned actions were further amplified following the 20 December 2013 European Council summit on defence. During the summit the EU heads of state and government endorsed the Commission’s and the EDA’s positions that ‘developing standards and certification procedures for defence equipment reduces costs, harmonizes demand and enhances interoperability’.

Following these conclusions, the EDA and the European Commission were tasked to develop hybrid standards for defence and the two institutions agreed to do this in cooperation with CEN, CENELEC and the ETSI.

As a first step in developing these hybrid standards, each of these organizations decided to form what is called the Defence Standardization Cooperation Group (DSCG) in order to give more structure and focus to the EU’s efforts. Formerly known as the CEN-CENELEC Stakeholder Forum for Defence Procurement Standardization (SFDPS), the DSCG does not develop standards itself but it aims to be the single interface between industry, governments and militaries in Europe.

The second step was deciding on what areas the DSCG would focus on and a collective decision was taken to concentrate on four specific technical areas including defence shields, impulse noise from military weapons, explosives and pyrotechnics and hearing protection. A year later in 2014, the Commission published yet another Communication calling for ‘A New Deal for European Defence’ (see COM/2014/0387) in which it reaffirmed its commitment to defence standardization.

Here, it set down a roadmap for a competitive defence industry based on greater standardization and certification in the areas of MIS and RPAS (European Commission, 2014b). By announcing that it would launch these two pilot areas as case studies to display the added-value of hybrid standards, the Commission set in motion a process that would see the DSCG begin to focus on tangible results.

To this end, the Commission’s 2015 progress report on its defence roadmap highlighted how the Commission had been carefully studying the role of the EASA in relation to civil aviation standards and their possible application to the defence sector. EASA was established in 2002 as an EU agency to promote the use of aviation standards and to certify and approve products and organizations in areas such as airworthiness. In fact, the Commission used its progress report to state that ‘recent submissions by the industry of applications for EASA certification of dual-use [RPAS] show that EASA in close cooperation with the Commission and the Member States has a significant contribution to make in this domain’.

Source note:

The information provided in this section is part of the Study on “European Armaments Standardization’ – EP/EXPO/B/SEDE/FWC/2017-01/01 EN October 2018 – PE 603.872 – European Parliament – Directorate General for External Policies of the Union – Policy Department for External Relations. The “European Armaments Standardization” Study can be found here