The MoU follows the Letter of Intent (LoI) which was signed on July 2018 by Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain. Yesterday, Finland joined the initiative as first partner nation.
The MBDM initiative includes all munition defined by participating Allies and partners as decisive for operations in the maritime domain. The variety of ammunition is widespread and includes surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, torpedoes and gun shells. The MBDM is the third one of the NATO High Visibility Projects in the area of munitions, the previous two being Land Battle Decisive Munitions (LBDM) and Precision Guided Munition (PGM).
This NATO program provides a framework for the acquisition and life-cycle management of key munitions for the maritime domain. Furthermore, it aims to increase flexibility in stockpile management by decreasing legal and technical obstacles to sharing and exchanging munitions.
Overall, the management of the munition throughout its whole lifetime can be systematically done on a multinational level. In the long term, the project endeavors to increase the interchangeability of MBDM stockpiles as well as achieving greater commonality among the nations’ inventories.
This MoU provides the legal basis for the participants to jointly acquire and commonly stockpile and store a wide range of maritime munitions. Within the MoU the participants have agreed on establishing a Management Group (MG) with a rotating lead nation role. Under this MG, for each specific munition type, an MBDM Sub-group will be established to manage activities for this particular munition type.
