At yesterday’s OCCAR-EDA bilateral in Bonn, OCCAR Director Arturo Alfonso-Meiriño and the Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency, Jorge Domecq, have exchanged letters describing the role of the EDA in support of the ESSOR Programme.
OCCAR manages the ESSOR Programme for Finland, France, Italy, Poland and Spain, whilst Germany is currently an observer to this Programme. The ESSOR Programme launched its Operational Capability 1 phase in November 2017, with an Operational Budget of €50 million.
In 2006, EDA established the Project Team Software Defined Radio (SDR) with the goal to define a common European concept and position on SDR architecture developments, promoting the working relations with the most important SDR stakeholders and coordinating the vision, policies and initiatives for emergence of SDR developments that serve European interest and autonomy. This is in line with EDA’s role as the European forum for joint capability development and the prioritised Capability Development Plan (CDP) scope of Tactical CIS in response to CSDP requirements to greatly enhance the interoperability of communication systems.
Considering that enhanced cooperation with OCCAR also features among the recommendations endorsed by the Defence Ministers after EDA’s recent Long Term Review (LTR), with this exchange of letters, EDA formally commits to facilitate the coherence between the ESSOR Programme and the activities of EDA in Software Defined Radio (SDR) area, and to promote the ESSOR products, in particular the waveform and architecture of the system.