Since
2016

Participating Countries
All EDA member states

Partners
N/A

SUMMARY

EDA has developed the Defence Policy (DPOL) Database with the goal of facilitating the exchange of information on Member States’ defence-related policies and supporting EDA’s work on the Capability Development Plan, the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence, and the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base. The DPOL Database contains relevant documents from EU Member States and Third States with an Administrative Arrangement, as well as the EU and NATO, providing a comprehensive overview of national and intergovernmental positions on a wide spectrum of issues related to security and defence. The database’s improved functionality allows users to easily search for relevant information within documents and automatically compile a variety of reports, based on user-defined criteria.

Goals

  • to support the EDA work on the Capability Development Plan, the reporting on Pooling & Sharing in the annual state of play and the European Defence Industrial Base
  • to share information on Member States’ defence policies.

ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION

In order to support the EDA's work on the Capability Development Plan, the reporting on Pooling & Sharing in the annual state of play and the European Defence Industrial Base, EDA has developed the Defence Policy (DPOL) Database. The objective is to share information on Member States’ defence policies.

The database contains defence policy documents from EU Member States and Third States with an Administrative Arrangement, as well as the EU and NATO. It is based on a bibliography composed of more than 100 documents published by governmental authorities such as national strategies, white papers, strategic concepts, military guidelines, defence industrial policies and defence reports. The majority of the documents currently in the database was collected from open sources. Additionally, to date, several pMS have transmitted documents which have been incorporated accordingly. Relevant contributions from pMS and their updates are highly encouraged.

The database features a repository of all documents and the analytical functionalities of the software allow users to search for specific information. For instance, content can be filtered along several indicators including strategic objectives and long term vision, threat perception, geographical areas of interest, and level of ambition.

Different levels of granularity are available to support different types of research. Documents have been tagged using several applicable taxonomies, including the Generic Military Task List (GMTL) and the domain/equipment taxonomy used in the Capability Development Plan (CDP) and the Collaborative Database (CODABA). These shared taxonomies increase the interoperability of EDA applications and will allow to link the DPOL Database with the CDP software at a later stage. 

Latest updates

The web application was launched on 13 June 2016 at https://dpol.eda.europa.eu and will be accessible to governmental users. Interested governmental users with an EDA account may request access to the database in the Applications tab of my.EDA. Users without a valid EDA account are invited to complete the registration procedure on https://registration.eda.europa.eu and indicate access to DPOL as reason for application. Alternatively, access can be requested by sending a registration email to dpol(a)eda.europa.eu. Any queries can be forwarded to DPOL moderators at dpol(a)eda.europa.eu.