NATO HQ 13 June 2003

Statement by Federal Minister of Defence of the Republic of Austria, Mr. Günther Platter at the EAPC at the level of Defence Ministers Brussels "Possible Roles for operational Partnership" Chairman, Excellencies, Austria welcomes the new EU-NATO arrangements and their implemen-tation in Operation CONCORDIA. In the Balkans NATO and Austria share a common interest which is wide spread and self-sustaining stabil-ity and security on the basis of democratic structures and a stabile econ-omy. We see promising progress although much remains to be achieved. Hence Austria believes in the need of concerted efforts by the EU and NATO/PfP in the region. In terms of security policy we also hope that the conditions for membership of Serbia and Montenegro as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina in EAPC and PfP will be met as soon as possible. Austria’s approach to an operational Partnership is to reach the widest interoperability possible and to continue to provide interoperable forces for NATO-led PfP operations. We believe that the efforts of our armed forces in the Balkans have so far been successful from an operational point of view. In the future, how-ever, we are looking for ways to formally certify the interoperability of our forces foreseen for NATO-led and other international operations. In our opinion, OCC is best suited to measure national achievements against standardised interoperability criteria. To gain more effectiveness Austria believes that the OCC Assessment and Feedback Mechanism should resemble the existing NATO-internal assessment tools like TA-CEVAL and OPEVAL. We should strive to develop common and practi-cal quality criteria to make assessment results more objective and measurable. Austria will contribute to OCC by beginning “Self-Assessment” and “OCC-Assessment” of its forces offered within the PARP process in the near future. Besides OCC, we see TEEP as another very helpful initiative for improv-ing interoperability. To name a specific area within TEEP, it would be very helpful if one central authority within the new NATO Command Structure were to have an overall responsibility for all PfP related training issues. We also promote the idea of allocating the task of developing general training guidelines to this central authority. National training strategies should then reflect these guidelines as much as possible. Furthermore, the PfP Training Centres currently only represent 2 NATO–countries out of 19 and 7 PfP – countries out of 27. That means that training institutions of 36 nations are not incorporated in this initiative. To bring TEEP to better results, Austria suggests that all PSO-training cen-tres from NATO and Partner countries should be encouraged to join this initiative as an “EAPC Association of PSO Training Centres”. Let me once again express our appreciation for the work done so far in this regard and let me assure our further contribution to these very im-portant PfP initiatives.