Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP)

The Act in Support of Ammunition Production, known by the deliberately chosen acronym ASAP, is Regulation (EU) 2023/1525 of the European Parliament and of the Council, adopted on 20 July 2023 and entering into force on 26 July 2023. It was proposed by the European Commission on 3 May 2023 under Article 173(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which governs Union action to ensure the competitiveness of EU industry, with additional reliance on Article 114 TFEU for internal market measures. ASAP forms the third track of the EU's three-track ammunition strategy agreed by the Foreign Affairs Council on 20 March 2023, complementing track one (drawdown from existing stocks via the European Peace Facility) and track two (joint procurement under the European Defence Agency and the EDIRPA regulation). Its explicit aim, recorded in the preamble, is to ramp up Union production capacity for ground-to-ground and artillery ammunition — principally 155 mm shells — and missiles, in response to the depletion of stockpiles caused by support to Ukraine following the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022.

Procedurally, ASAP operates through a €500 million financial envelope drawn from the EU budget for the period running through 30 June 2025, co-financing investments by defence-industrial operators established in the Union or in associated countries. The Commission, assisted by an ASAP programme committee of member-state representatives, issues calls for proposals. Eligible actions include the construction of new production facilities, the reopening of mothballed lines, the expansion or modernisation of existing plants, the industrialisation of testing and reconditioning capabilities, the securing of critical raw materials such as nitrocellulose and TNT precursors, and workforce reskilling. Co-financing rates are tiered: up to 35 % for general production capacity, with bonuses raising the ceiling to 40–50 % for projects involving cross-border cooperation, SMEs and mid-caps, or recipients with pre-existing aggregated demand contracts from member states.

ASAP also introduces two regulatory instruments that go beyond grant-making. First, it creates a mapping mechanism allowing the Commission to survey supply chains and identify bottlenecks in the production of relevant defence products. Second, and more intrusively, Articles 11 to 14 establish a crisis-response toolkit including the designation of priority-rated orders: where a member state faces severe difficulty placing or executing an order for ammunition or missiles, the Commission may, with the supplier's consent and following consultation, require that company to accept and prioritise the order over other commercial commitments. Reciprocal arrangements with third-country suppliers and provisions on the temporary acceleration of permitting procedures, including derogations from certain environmental assessment timelines under the REACH and Seveso III frameworks, were also included after intense negotiation in trilogue.

The first ASAP grant decisions were announced by Commissioner Thierry Breton on 15 March 2024, allocating the full €500 million to 31 projects across 15 member states and Norway. Beneficiaries included Nammo (Norway and Finland), Rheinmetall (Germany, Spain, Hungary), Nexter/KNDS (France), MBDA (multiple sites), Eurenco (France, Sweden, Belgium) for propellant powders, BAE Systems Bofors (Sweden), and PGZ subsidiaries (Poland). The Commission projected that the supported investments would lift EU annual 155 mm shell production capacity from roughly 230,000 rounds in early 2023 to approximately 2 million by the end of 2025, a target reiterated by High Representative Josep Borrell and Internal Market Commissioner Breton throughout 2024.

ASAP must be distinguished from adjacent instruments with which it is sometimes conflated. The European Defence Industry Reinforcement through common Procurement Act (EDIRPA), Regulation (EU) 2023/2418, addresses the demand side by incentivising joint procurement among at least three member states, whereas ASAP addresses the supply side by financing manufacturing capacity. The European Peace Facility (EPF), an off-budget instrument under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, reimburses member states for lethal aid delivered to Ukraine and operates under Council, not Commission, authority. The successor European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), proposed in March 2024, is intended to consolidate and extend the ASAP and EDIRPA logics into a permanent structural instrument after their expiry.

Controversies surrounding ASAP centred on three issues. First, the use of Article 173 TFEU as a legal basis was challenged by some delegations who argued that defence-industrial measures fall under Article 346 TFEU national-security carve-outs; the European Parliament's legal service endorsed the Commission's reading. Second, the strict eligibility requirement that components originate in the EU or associated countries — with a 65 % rule on component value — drew protest from suppliers reliant on US, UK, or South Korean inputs, particularly for propellants. Third, civil-society organisations including the European Network Against Arms Trade criticised the redirection of cohesion-related funding lines (the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the European Defence Fund) to feed the envelope.

For the working practitioner, ASAP marks a constitutional inflection point: it is the first EU regulation to mobilise the common budget directly for the expansion of lethal-munitions manufacturing, breaching a long-standing taboo rooted in Article 41(2) of the Treaty on European Union. Desk officers handling defence-industrial files, procurement attachés in permanent representations, and analysts tracking the militarisation of EU industrial policy should read ASAP alongside the March 2024 European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) and the EDIP proposal as a single trajectory pointing toward a structural Union role in defence production conditioned by — but not limited to — the war in Ukraine.