Out of Its Lane: The EDA, the Carl-Gustaf, and the Mandate Question Behind EU Ammunition Procurement

The Question That Actually Matters

When two multinational agencies sign frameworks for the same weapon from the same supplier inside eleven years, the lazy reading is duplication. The structural reading looks at coordination. Both miss the point. The Carl-Gustaf case is most useful as a window onto an institutional question that has gone largely undiscussed outside Brussels: whether the EDA should be in the ammunition contracting business at all.

NSPA should be, and is. The agency has been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) acquisition executive since 1958 under its original name, the NATO Maintenance and Supply Agency (NAMSA), and since 2012 under its current title. Procurement is what it was built to do. Its 2023 Carl-Gustaf framework with Saab Dynamics sits dead centre of that mandate — Alliance-wide aggregated demand, open tendering practices, call-off delivery on a no-profit-no-loss basis under the NATO Support and Procurement Organisation (NSPO) Charter.

The EDA’s 2014 Effective Procurement Methods (EPM) framework for 84mm ammunition, and its June 2025 Collaborative Procurement of Ammunition (CPoA) framework for the same weapon, sit somewhere else. Not plainly outside the mandate — the EDA’s founding instruments do allow it to manage specific programmes at Member State request — but well away from the centre of what the agency was established to do. The 2025 framework in particular rests on a contracting authority the EDA only acquired in March 2023, under emergency legal construction, because the European Union (EU) needed a procurement vehicle for collaborative ammunition purchases and none of its existing bodies quite fitted.

That is the story. Not duplication. Mandate creep, formalised in a crisis, now being institutionalised through a sole-supplier case where the political stakes are low and the precedent-setting stakes are high.

The Weapon in Brief

The Carl-Gustaf is an 84mm reloadable recoilless weapon system in continuous Saab production since 1948, currently in its fourth principal variant (the M4, designated CGM4 by Saab Dynamics AB). It is a man-portable infantry weapon optimised for direct-fire engagement of armour, structures, bunkers and personnel at ranges out to approximately 1,000 metres depending on round and target type. It is in service with more than 40 armed forces and has seen intensive operational use in Ukraine since 2022.

The ammunition family in current production includes, among others, the FFV 441D high-explosive dual-purpose round, the FFV 502 HEDP (high-explosive dual purpose, anti-structure), the FFV 509 ASM (anti-structure munition), the FFV 551C high-explosive anti-tank round, the FFV 545 illuminating round, and the FFV 469C smoke round. Each round has a discrete hazard classification and net explosive quantity (NEQ), typically Hazard Division (HD) 1.1 for cartridges with bursting charges and HD 1.2 where fragmentation is the dominant hazard. Storage and transport fall under AOP-7 and STANAG 4439 compliance regimes, with UK national disposition governed by DSA 03.OME.

The industrial reality that governs everything downstream is straightforward: Saab Dynamics is the sole original equipment manufacturer (OEM). There is no competing producer. Whichever mechanism an EU Member State or NATO Ally uses to buy 84mm ammunition, the contract ends at Karlskoga. This matters for the analysis that follows because it means the choice of procurement track has no effect on the industrial outcome. It is a political signal without an industrial consequence — which is precisely what makes the Carl-Gustaf case a revealing rehearsal for procurement mechanisms that will later be applied to systems where the supplier choice genuinely is contested.

What the EDA Was Designed to Do

The EDA was established by Council Joint Action 2004/551/CFSP in July 2004 and recast by Council Decision (CFSP) 2015/1835, which remains the governing instrument. Article 5 of the 2015 Decision lists the agency’s functions in four clusters: capability development (Article 5(3)(a)), defence research and technology (Article 5(3)(b)), cooperative armaments programmes (Article 5(3)(c)), and support to the EDTIB (Article 5(3)(d)). There is a residual provision (Article 5(3)(f)) allowing the agency to manage specific programmes when requested by participating Member States, but this is expressed as an auxiliary function, not a primary one.

The pattern of EDA practice for most of its first two decades matched that formal hierarchy. The agency coordinated, facilitated, convened, and staffed the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (CARD) cycle. Actual procurement contracting — meaning the signing of binding commercial instruments with suppliers on behalf of Member States — was almost always handled by someone else. Where multinational procurement was required, Member States routed it through the Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d’Armement (OCCAR), which is structurally a procurement organisation and has been contracting European collaborative programmes since 1996. Where national procurement was preferred, Member States used their own defence ministries. The EDA filled neither gap. It filled the coordination and capability-planning gap between them.

The 2014 EPM framework for Carl-Gustaf ammunition was, read strictly, a marginal use of the residual Article 5(3)(f) route. It was small (five participating states), lightweight (pooled call-off against negotiated unit prices), and procedurally distinct from a full EDA Category A project. It stretched the agency’s ordinary practice without breaking it. The contracting authority was nominally the EDA, but the arrangement was closer to a secretariat-facilitated joint purchase than to an acquisition executive function. Most EDA activity before and after 2014 did not look like this.

The salient point is that the EDA did not grow organically into a procurement body. It was not designed to be one. Its staff complement, its procedural machinery, its legal basis, and its institutional culture were built around capability planning and industrial policy coordination. Signing large framework contracts with binding delivery obligations on behalf of multiple states is adjacent to, but functionally different from, that original remit.

What NSPA Was Designed to Do

NSPA inherited the role and staff of NAMSA, which was stood up in 1958 to provide cooperative logistics and procurement support to the Alliance. In 2012 the organisation was restructured into the NSPO, with NSPA as its executive body. The organisation was built around procurement and support from the start and has been doing it continuously for more than six decades.

The NSPA operating model is distinctive: open competition among industry in the 32 Allied nations, aggregated demand across participating Allies, call-off frameworks with pre-negotiated terms, life-cycle logistic and sustainment services, and financial administration on a no-profit-no-loss basis. The agency employs more than 1,700 staff in procurement, logistics, engineering and financial functions across facilities in Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere. Its procurement volume runs at several billion euros per year across munitions, fuels, aviation sustainment, satellite communications and a wide range of other portfolios.

The 2023 Carl-Gustaf framework with Saab Dynamics is an unremarkable piece of NSPA business. It aggregates demand from multiple Allies, covers the launcher and the full ammunition family, runs to 2027, and is being executed through 2024 and 2025 call-off orders that include both national stockpile replenishment and sustained Ukrainian donation flows. The framework has the shape of dozens of other NSPA munitions frameworks signed over the past decade. The point is not that NSPA is doing something impressive with this contract; the point is that NSPA is doing exactly what sixty-five years of institutional development have equipped it to do.

How the EDA Got Into the Contracting Business

The expansion of the EDA’s procurement role did not emerge from a deliberate reform of the agency’s mandate. It emerged from a crisis. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed two uncomfortable realities at once: first, that European ammunition production had contracted substantially during the peace dividend years; second, that the EU had no mature institutional machinery for coordinating emergency joint procurement of munitions at scale.

The EU response, announced in March 2023, had three tracks: donate existing stocks to Ukraine, jointly procure new ammunition, and expand industrial production capacity. The first track used the European Peace Facility. The third track produced Regulation (EU) 2023/1525, the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), which funded industrial capacity expansion. The middle track — joint procurement — required a contracting authority. Council Decision (CFSP) 2023/1560, adopted in March 2023, authorised the EDA to act as a “central purchasing body” on behalf of participating Member States for the joint procurement of ammunition. Eighteen Member States plus Norway signed the corresponding project arrangement for 155mm rounds. It was the EDA’s first proper procurement execution role at Alliance-relevant scale.

The construction was legally novel. The Council Decision leaned on the EDA’s residual Article 5(3)(f) authority to manage specific programmes at Member State request, stretched to cover acting as a commercial counterpart under framework contracts. The emergency context carried the political weight. Speed trumped institutional tidiness. The March 2023 decision was intended to address an immediate ammunition crunch, but its legal logic did not come with an expiration date.

The CPoA mechanism emerged out of that same construction and was progressively generalised across ammunition types. By the time the June 2025 Carl-Gustaf CPoA framework was signed, the EDA had been acting as a contracting authority for ammunition for just over two years. The 2025 framework is therefore not an organic extension of the 2014 EPM precedent. It is an extension of a 2023 emergency legal construction, now being applied to a second ammunition type with a different scale and a different political weight than 155mm.

The Three Frameworks Through the Mandate Lens

Read side-by-side against what each agency was designed to do, the three Carl-Gustaf frameworks look rather different from the “two complementary tracks” reading that a surface analysis would produce.

Two of these frameworks are institutional business-as-usual. The 2014 EDA EPM arrangement, though small, fits a defensible reading of the agency’s residual programme management authority. The 2023 NSPA framework is what NSPA does. The outlier is the 2025 EDA CPoA framework, which exists because a 2023 Council Decision attached a new function to an agency that had not previously exercised it at scale, and which the EDA now appears to be operating as a permanent rather than emergency capability.

The OCCAR Question

If the EU needed a collaborative procurement body for ammunition in 2023, one already existed. OCCAR was founded in 1996 specifically to manage collaborative European armaments procurement. It has executed major multinational programmes including the A400M transport aircraft, the Boxer armoured vehicle, the European Multi-Mission Frigate (FREMM), the Tiger attack helicopter and the Multi-Role Tanker Transport (MRTT). Procurement execution is its institutional specialism.

OCCAR was not used for the 2023 ammunition response. The reasons are worth making explicit because they illustrate why the EDA route was chosen, and what kind of choice that was.

OCCAR has six full member states (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom), plus associated programmes with additional partners. It is an intergovernmental organisation, not an EU body. Attaching EU industrial policy conditionality — ASAP, European Defence Fund (EDF), or European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) funding rules; EU eligibility requirements for contractor establishment and technical control; Commission oversight mechanisms — is procedurally awkward for a non-EU organisation. The political logic of the 2023 response required a procurement vehicle inside the EU institutional perimeter. OCCAR is outside it.

The Commission and the Council therefore had two options. They could construct a new EU procurement body, which would have taken years and would have been politically explosive in terms of Member State competence. Or they could attach procurement authority to an existing EU defence body that did not currently exercise it. The second option was chosen, and the EDA absorbed the function. That was a pragmatic choice in a crisis. Whether it is the right long-term institutional settlement for EU defence procurement is a different question, and one that has not yet been properly posed inside the Council.

Why the Sole-Supplier Case Makes This Political Theatre

The Carl-Gustaf is an unusual test case because Saab Dynamics is the only source. The choice of procurement mechanism therefore produces no supplier-selection effect. The same rounds come out of the same Karlskoga production lines under the same NATO quality assurance regime (AQAP-2110 Edition D on the supplier side) regardless of whether the framework is EDA or NSPA. EU strategic autonomy rhetoric cannot find substantive industrial expression here because there is nothing for it to select against.

What the 2025 EDA CPoA framework does produce is a political signal. It communicates that the EU can procure ammunition through its own channel, using its own eligibility rules, applying its own industrial policy conditionality, without recourse to NATO machinery. The signal is directed partly inward (to EU Member States that want visible evidence of strategic autonomy), partly outward (to the United States and the United Kingdom, as a statement that the EU has an alternative procurement track), and partly toward industry (to communicate that contracting through EU channels has become a stable rather than emergency option).

In the Carl-Gustaf case the signal is cheap. Saab would supply either way. But institutional rehearsal matters. The procedures, the contractual templates, the coordination practices and the precedents being established in the easy cases become the machinery that applies to the harder cases. 155mm artillery ammunition has multiple competitive suppliers across the transatlantic industrial base. Air defence interceptor missiles do. Loitering munitions do. The CPoA mechanism, once normalised on the Carl-Gustaf, becomes available for those harder cases — and in those cases the supplier-selection effect is real and material.

Where Mandate Creep Begins to Bite

A permanent expansion of the EDA’s contracting role, achieved by emergency Council decision and then rolled forward without fresh parliamentary scrutiny, carries several costs that a mandate-lens reading makes visible but a duplication-lens reading does not.

Institutional capacity

The EDA staff establishment was sized and recruited for a capability-planning body, not an acquisition executive. Procurement execution at scale requires contract lawyers, quality assurance engineers, technical authorities, supplier performance managers, and audit functions. NSPA has those cadres institutionally; EDA has been building them opportunistically as the 2023 role expanded. The question is not whether the EDA can acquire this capacity — clearly it can — but whether the EU should be running a parallel procurement cadre inside the EDA when an equivalent cadre already exists inside NSPA, with Member State participation in both.

Legal ambiguity

Council Decision (CFSP) 2023/1560 rests on a particular reading of the EDA’s residual Article 5(3)(f) authority. That reading has not been tested before the Court of Justice of the European Union. A contested future procurement — for example, a disappointed bidder from a non-EU country challenging their exclusion from a CPoA framework on ownership-and-control grounds — could open the question of whether the Council decision was an adequate basis for the EDA to act as commercial counterpart in a binding framework contract. A stronger long-term basis would probably require amendment of the 2015 Council Decision itself. That amendment has not been proposed.

Demand signal fragmentation

From Saab’s perspective — and from the perspective of any supplier holding parallel EU and NATO framework contracts — the fragmentation of demand into three channels (NSPA, EDA CPoA, and direct national contracting) complicates industrial planning. The 2014 EDA EPM pattern of small pooled orders is manageable. Layering a second EDA framework of non-trivial scale on top of a mature NSPA framework, both from the same OEM, forces Saab to run three order books and reconcile three sets of pricing, delivery terms, and quality assurance interfaces. This is not catastrophic, but it is not costless, and the cost is ultimately absorbed into unit price.

Precedent risk

The Carl-Gustaf case establishes, quietly, that CPoA can be used for any ammunition type that EU Member States want to aggregate demand for. The next applications will not be sole-supplier cases. They will be cases where a CPoA framework materially excludes US, UK, Korean, Israeli or other non-EU suppliers through eligibility conditionality, and where NSPA would have produced a more open tender. The shift will look incremental — one framework, one ammunition type — but the aggregate trajectory is the systematic redistribution of EU Member State procurement spend from Alliance-wide tendering toward EU-internal tendering. That may be what the EU wants. It has not been explicitly decided by the Council or by national parliaments. It is being achieved by accretion.

What the Coordination Architecture Does and Does Not Solve

The EDA, NSPA and OCCAR operate a trilateral coordination mechanism that has been in place in various forms since 2012. Joint working arrangements cover programme harmonisation, standards alignment and life-cycle coordination. In the Carl-Gustaf case, this mechanism matters at the technical level: a round qualified for NSPA delivery under AOP-7 and STANAG 4439 is, at the lot-management level, the same round qualified for EDA delivery. There is no bifurcation of the technical baseline.

What the trilateral mechanism does not solve is the mandate question. It is a coordination mechanism among three agencies with different legal statuses, different member groups and different purposes. It can stop the agencies from getting in each other’s way operationally. It cannot answer whether the underlying division of procurement labour between them is institutionally sensible. That question sits above the trilateral mechanism and is a Council and Member State question rather than an agency question. The silence of the Council on it — the absence of any post-2023 review of whether the EDA’s expanded procurement role should be permanent, temporary, or transferred to OCCAR or NSPA — is itself a finding.

What a Participating State Should Notice

From a national procurement perspective, the practical choices for buying 84mm ammunition remain what they were. A state can buy nationally from Saab. It can call off against the NSPA framework. It can participate in the EDA CPoA framework if it is an EU Member State. The rounds are the same; the price differences will be modest; the logistics are compatible. For the procurement officer, the mandate question has limited immediate operational relevance.

For defence ministries and their parliamentary committees, the mandate question has more weight. Each time a national ministry routes demand through CPoA rather than NSPA, it is registering a small political vote for a particular model of European defence procurement — one in which the EU institutional perimeter captures an increasing share of joint procurement activity, through a body that was not originally designed for the role. That is a legitimate policy preference. It is worth being honest that it is a policy preference, not a neutral procurement efficiency choice.

The Institutional Story Behind the Industrial Story

The Carl-Gustaf frameworks are, at the industrial level, a routine piece of European defence procurement. Three contracts, one OEM, interchangeable output, sustained through standard NATO qualification. At the institutional level they tell a different and more interesting story: how a European agency with a clearly delimited coordination mandate acquired a contracting function in an emergency, applied it first to a politically urgent case (155mm), and has now applied it to a politically low-stakes case (Carl-Gustaf) that serves mainly as rehearsal for future applications where the stakes will be higher.

Nothing about that trajectory is improper. The EDA is acting under a Council Decision. Member States have the sovereign right to route their procurement through whichever mechanism they prefer. The emergency origins of the contracting role were reasonable in context. What is missing is the deliberate step of asking — now that the acute phase of the 2022–2023 ammunition crisis has passed — whether the EDA should retain a procurement function as a permanent part of its mandate, or whether that function should be transferred to a body institutionally designed for it. No such review is underway. The 2015 Council Decision remains the unamended governing instrument, and the 2023 Council Decision operates alongside it on an indefinite emergency footing.

That is a quietly significant place for the EU’s defence procurement architecture to sit. The Carl-Gustaf frameworks are useful mainly as the lens that makes it visible.