NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe is slated to finish the initial draft of a formal requirements document for strategic airlift by this summer, sources tell Inside the Pentagon.

The effort is expected to form the basis upon which the alliance builds its airlift capabilities, potentially costing billions. Typically, these “minimum military requirements” proposals, as they are called in NATO jargon, go before the alliance's Military Committee to iron out differences among member nations, and then to the North Atlantic Council for final approval.

Officials in North America and Europe have long decried a shortfall in NATO's ability to project large cargo, like armored vehicles or helicopters, to distant theaters. The capability is deemed crucial for operations to be performed by the alliance's new Response Force, slated to become fully operational this fall, as well as worldwide relief missions and exercises.

“I think the alliance needs strategic lift because we don't have any,” Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told sister publication Inside the Air Force earlier this month. “We have a lot of C-130s in the alliance but [they] are aircraft you use once you get to Afghanistan. We need a vehicle that can take us from Europe to Afghanistan, or Europe to Africa.”

NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment Marshall Billingslea recently circulated a briefing among officials that sheds light on the thinking of top alliance decision-makers in the area of strategic airlift. The document, obtained by ITP, is intended to inform planning and preparations for a treatment of the issue at the November NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, sources say.

The document proposes a shared financing strategy for two to six Boeing-made C-17 Globemaster aircraft. Participating NATO nations would team up to pay for the aircraft based on the number of flying hours they need, according to the document. (To illustrate the value of a flying hour, the document calculates 15 such units for a round trip to Kabul.)

The idea behind the effort is to enable nations that cannot afford a $220 million-apiece C-17 to obtain such a capability on a more affordable basis, a NATO source familiar with the proposal said this week.

In order to go forward, four or five participating nations would be “desirable,” according to the document. Maintenance for the aircraft could be performed at bases in the United Kingdom or United States because both countries already have C-17s, the document reads.

Supported by a NATO-owned “integrated military structure” to fly the machines and provide logistics support, the proposal would keep personnel and maintenance cost low, the document argues. For example, if four nations jointly owned four C-17, they would only have to shell out 13 million Euros per year, compared with 24 million Euros each nation would have to spend on personnel if they each owned an aircraft.

NATO country representatives convened for an informal meeting March 9 to discuss the C-17 idea, according to the source.

“None of them jumped up and said, ‘Yeah, we are believers now,'” the source said. Rather, the delegates at the event wanted more information and more time to think about the proposal, the source told ITP.

NATO now takes a number of different approaches for obtaining large cargo aircraft when needed.

Buying airlift capability through what the document calls the “free market” is one of the options discussed in the proposal. But prices “escalate” when demand surges, the paper reads, citing Pakistan earthquake relief work last fall as an example.

Relying on loaned equipment from “allies” also has drawbacks because aircraft may not be available when NATO needs them, according to the document.

Another option for obtaining strategic airlift capability is the recently finalized strategic airlift interim solution (SALIS), the document notes. Earlier this year, a consortium of 16 NATO and European Union countries finalized a charter arrangement with Russia and the Ukraine that grants the alliance access to six Antonov An-124 aircraft, Ukranian-made freight aircraft with a maximum cargo capacity of about 130 tons.

Two of the aircraft will be stationed at Leipzig, Germany, and NATO can use them at any time. The first aircraft is slated to arrive there this week, one official familiar with the deal told ITP this week.

NATO can request four more aircraft from Russia and the Ukraine when needed -- two at six-day notice and two within nine days, according to the document.

The An-124's limitations are its range, long runway requirements and non-pressurized cargo hold, the document states. The runway requirement makes it impossible for the aircraft to land on short airstrips in Herat or Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the SALIS contract restricts the aircraft for use in “an environment that does not require defensive aid equipped cargo aircraft,” according to the document.

Another future strategic airlift option for NATO countries, the Airbus A400M, is a “highly capable plane when it enters production,” the document states, but “it will not be available to nations in sufficient numbers until 2012 or later.”

Meanwhile, individual nations are working to fill their own airlift capability gap. The United Kingdom, for example, already has four C-17s and is thinking about a fifth, said one NATO source.

Moreover, Sweden is considering to purchase two C-17s independent of NATO's considerations, according to Stephan Kallmen, defense counselor with the Swedish Embassy in Washington.

Cost and time constraints are Stockholm's biggest concerns, he told ITP March 21. The country wants to have a strategic airlift capability by Jan. 1, 2008, when it takes over the lead of a European Battle Group slated to include Norway, Finland and Estonia, he said.