Thank you, sir, for the question.
I think the Permanent Structured Cooperation agreement in the EU is what you're talking about. It is something we've talked about a little bit at the Conference of National Armaments Directors.
Usually when we get together, for half of the day we invite the EU and others, and some of the partner countries, to come and join us so that we can discuss some of these things. I would compare it to NORAD in North America. It is a separate piece, and if you read through.... I had a chance to look through some of their things. They talk about commitments to the EU force and through the PESCO, but that does not preclude NATO and other things.
There's already a degree of common procurement going on among the EU countries, so this brings it together a bit more. I don't think it's in competition. I think it will help bring them forward to their 2% or otherwise.
I would say that through some of the discussions we've had about advancing projects and being careful about it, even in NATO there is often a struggle in some of the projects to bring real expertise and capacity together. It falls to the 29 to provide people, and not everybody who has domestic projects and a lot under way is going to provide a lot of people. There's usually a constant call there.
Certainly what I've expressed to my colleagues is a caution to make sure that the NATO projects aren't the ones that suffer. They have their domestic projects and they're putting people there, and now they have the EU projects and they're putting people there, so that's an area we're trying to be very careful about. A lot of it in the context of the EU—