National governments, the EU, and NATO are considering how to expand their individual and joint military mobility (MM) efforts across Europe during the next decade, with a broad emphasis on speeding up procedures for transit movement across national borders.
The Dutch Ministry of Defence has worked with civil authorities to create three multimodal corridors of infrastructure for military movements across the Netherlands: road (photo of CV90 infantry fighting vehicles moving by highway), rail, and inland waterways. (Dutch MoD)
“We want a well-functioning hub-and-spoke model in Europe where the spokes would be its main multi-use routes and corridors and its hubs would be logistics centres for host nation transit support of military movements,” said Dutch Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld.
She and other officials proffered their views during a 6 May symposium on MM hosted at the European Defence Agency (EDA) in Brussels.
Noting that the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, Portugal, and other EU countries put forward the idea during an EU defence ministers meeting earlier the same day, she said, “We have proposed to define a common level of ambition, with specific goals for delivery by 2027. If one can order a book online for same-day delivery, then we ought to be able to expect the same thing regarding [requests for] host-nation transit support.”
Transit-related issues were a common chord during the symposium.
“We all need to improve air- and sealift capabilities in support of logistics,” said EDA chief executive Jiři Šedivŷ. “This will entail much more digitalisation and a need to harden processes, including civil-military IT [information technology] systems against cyber attacks.”
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