The Military Relevance of Recent Cooperative ET Projects

The introduction of presently emerging technologies into weapon systems will make it difficult for even the larger NATO countries to be self-supporting in arms production, so new forms of cooperation are being sought. Cooperation in the procurement and production of weapons has of course always been on NATO’s agenda. The use of different types of the same weapon system reduces military effectiveness, while greatly increasing costs. Even a standardisation of parts of the different nationally produced weapon systems would increase inter-operability on the battlefield. And with the costs of systems rising sharply, so that countries were no longer able to buy substantial amounts of any one system, the independent and often overlapping production by several different nations led to a wasteful overlap of research and production. Only the US, with its large home market, has been able to develop a really strong defence industry. But this resulted in an uneven transatlantic arms trade commonly known as the ‘one way street’.