OCCAR

The Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation ("OCCAR") was created in 1998 by the Farnborough Convention, signed by France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

OCCAR concretizes a new approach to European cooperation in the defence equipment field; its aim is to correct the shortfalls in current collaborations by creating a new type of organisation:

  Based on an international organisation status, it lays out legal status, which allows, in particular, to notify its own contracts;

  It substistutes for its armement programs the fair return principle with the global fair return. This tends to to ensure a multiannual and multiprogrammes balanced distribution;

  It institutes and implements common rules of management for the whole of the programs which are entrusted to him;

  It autorized to manage programs for the benefit of not only nation members but also of non-member nation(s).

Within this framework, the OCCAR acts as a delegated armament program prime-manager:

  prime manager: it is on the side of the clients which are the Nations;

  delegated: it clearly knows what it has to do and has a sphere of clean responsibility.

The OCCAR is not a closed structure. It already accomodated Belgium, then Spain and has vocation to accomodate new members which:

  accept current rules;

  take part in programs entrusted to this Organization.

Currently, the OCCAR organisation manage seven armament programs; France takes part in six of them (A400M ; COBRA ; FREMM ; FSAF ; TIGRE ; ROLAND).

This requires about 200 French persons dispatched on Bonn site (COBRA, TIGRE, BOXER and Central Office), around Paris (FREMM, FSAF, ROLAND) and Toulouse (A 400M).

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