Remarks
by NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoană at the signing ceremony of the accession of Romania to the Air Battle Decisive Munition Memorandum of Understanding
(As delivered)
Good afternoon and welcome to the signing ceremony marking the accession of Romania to NATO’s multinational High Visibility Project on Air Battle Decisive Munition – or short ABDM.
In recent years, NATO has enabled Allies and partners to create a series of these innovative multinational initiatives. These all aim to deliver critical capabilities for the Alliance under more favorable conditions.
Launched back in 2014, the project has lived up to this ambition. Through innovative acquisition strategies, participants have reduced their cost for precision guided munitions by 15 to 20 percent. In response to urgent operational requirements, they were able to cut down delivery timelines by up to one year. At the same time, they significantly improved their interoperability and shareability of their stockpiles making NATO troops a more unified force in operations.
It is not surprising that such success attracts broader interest. As such, I am particularly happy to see my home nation, Romania, joining here today the existing participants – and let me thank Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom. I like to thank Greece before this ceremony for the admirable contribution to our alliance in the last 70 years since Greece is a member of our great alliance. This is a merit to the Greek people, to the Greek leadership and we appreciate the fundamental contributions to our shared value, shared security and shared ambitions. In these testing times we need each other more than ever.
For this ceremony I would like to thank Greece as the lead nation, for officially welcoming my home country Romania on behalf of the entire ABDM community.
Moving forward I am confident that ABDM will maintain its impressive tempo of successfully delivering an increasing share of participants’ precision guided munitions requirements. And I am very very happy and I look forward to seeing this progress continuing. Thank you.