The difficulty in the multinational cooperation aspect of smart defence is how you reconcile the nations' calendars and nations' specifications. Examples in the past have proven that going multinational is not always the best solution. We all have in mind experiences where going multinational has resulted in more delays, more costs, and maybe not the best characteristics at the end. We want to build on the experiences from the past to find the right criteria to make sure that doing things together tomorrow will bring benefits, not disadvantages.
We have been working, for example, from the conceptual point of view on the notion of what we call strategic proximity: why nations would like to do things together in a given group on a given project. There may be regional geographic proximity. There may be notions of culture and language, a successful history of cooperation in the past, such as among a few nations that operate the F-16 in Europe—from Norway to Portugal and Belgium, and so on. Successful operations by these nations may encourage them to have another project in another domain together.
You may have nations sharing the same strategic vision. For example, there is the most recent Franco-British treaty at Lancaster House on doing things together in a defence environment. We look at the best chances for success in each project. It doesn't mean that all the groupings will be the same. To the contrary, we have about 25 projects that will be agreed upon in Chicago, and we have 200 more ideas on the table that we're going to continue working on afterwards.
No two groupings are similar. Every project encompasses somewhere between three and eight or nine nations, and all these groupings are different. For each topic there is another aspect of strategic proximity which gives you the best chances of success. This is what we're working on.