Canada joined NATO’s Air Battle Decisive Munitions (ABDM) framework on 17 April 2024, the alliance has announced.
The agreement was signed that day in Brussels on the margins of a bi-annual meeting of NATO’s National Armaments Directors.
Launched in 2014, the ABDM framework is one of NATO’s multinational High Visibility Projects, through which allies aggregate their munitions and missile requirements for the entire air domain and convert them into multinational buys to reduce costs and delivery times.
Prior to Canada joining, there were 15 ABDM framework participants: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom.
In the first half of 2024 the allies will have placed new contracts through the ABDM framework worth around EUR 360 million.
The ABDM framework is directly supported by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, which has been pivotal in reducing costs and speeding up deliveries through the framework. This strengthens NATO’s deterrence and defence posture and provides more options for allies to increase their support to Ukraine.
The ABDM project was introduced to address an issue that NATO first encountered during Operation ‘Unified Protector’ in Libya in 2011, when allies experienced difficulties with the availability of munitions. During this operation it was challenging for allies to share their individual munition stockpiles. The project therefore introduced a new, flexible approach allowing participating nations to share each other’s ABDM stocks, therefore making allied air forces more interoperable.
