Airbus A400M concept
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One of the driving forces behind Airbus’ A400M military transport program, and “pool” programs like NATO’s SALIS with Russian AN-124s or its recent C-17 pool, is Europe’s shortage of transport aircraft to support military missions. This shortage will not be fixed any time soon, but in the interim, NATO pools are about to be augmented by a more local partnership.

As the Netherlands struggles over proposed defense cuts, its Ministerie van Defensie recently signed an agreement with Germany, France and Belgium to create “European Air Transport Command” (EATC) as a coordination pool for their own military transports. This newly-signed draft agreement sets out how participating countries will manage the command’s operations, which will be conducted out of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. This new command will employ between 150 and 200 jobs in the area – but it won’t become a central base. The military air transport aircraft (mostly C-160 Transalls in France and Germany, plus some C-130H Hercules transports in Belgium & Holland) will continue to be stationed and maintained on the air bases of the participating countries. Even so, EATC participants expect to benefit from more “surge” capability available at need, as well as greater efficiencies in overall fleet use.

Note that 3 of the 4 countries have orders for A400M transports on the way (France – 50, Germany – 60, Belgium – 7), while the Dutch have made no firm decision re: replacement of their aging C-130H-30s. This decision begins to weight the scales for that eventual decision… and of course, it also furthers the objective of creating a parallel EU military structure outside of NATO. Dutch MvD release | Defense Aerospace translation.