STANAG 2818 demolition materiel (AOP-31 and AOP-32)

What it is

STANAG 2818 is a NATO Standardization Agreement, currently Edition 2, promulgated 24 May 2002. It is not itself a technical specification. It is the agreement by which NATO nations commit to apply two Allied Ordnance Publications to new demolition materiel: AOP-31, which sets the design principles and criteria for safety and suitability for service, and AOP-32, which sets out how that materiel is tested and assessed against them. The detail a reader usually wants, the design rules and test methods themselves, lives inside those two publications, not inside this cover. Read on its own, STANAG 2818 requires almost nothing of a supplier directly: its obligations run to nations, and it reaches an organisation only once a nation has implemented it and a contract or tender invokes AOP-31 or AOP-32.

Who it binds, and how

STANAG 2818 binds nations, not organisations, directly. It is "considered implemented by a nation when that nation has issues instructions in accordance with this agreement for new demolition material" covering design principles and criteria, the prescription of test and assessment methods, and the transmission of data and nationally obtained results. Ratification and implementation are separate steps: a nation can ratify "with or without reservation", and a reservation records the part of the agreement a nation will not implement, or will implement only with limitations. So whether STANAG 2818 applies to a given programme has no general answer, only a contractual one, once a nation has taken it on.

What the agreement commits nations to

Participating nations agree to apply AOP-31's design principles and criteria, and AOP-32's testing and assessment methods, to "all new demolition materiel intended for use by NATO armed forces." They also agree to share the results of their analyses, testing and assessment with other NATO nations, through the National Authority responsible for qualifying the munition, "upon valid request", which is how the agreement avoids nations duplicating each other's work on materiel supplied by another nation or service. Each nation's National Authority carries the operational weight: applying AOP-31's design criteria, deciding acceptance for military use on the basis of AOP-32's analyses and testing, carrying out the mandatory tasks the STANAG and its AOPs set, and deciding whether a given item counts as "new demolition materiel" under the STANAG's own definition.

What "new demolition materiel" means here

The STANAG's obligations turn on a specific definition, not the ordinary meaning of "new." A demolition materiel counts as new when it differs from materiel already accepted for use by a NATO force in any of six respects: its design, defined against its full data package of material specifications and drawings; its users' manuals and other user instructions; its production definition, meaning product processing, tooling and quality assurance; its acceptance testing; its specific use or role; or its life cycle profile and the resulting environmental profile. A National Authority applies this test, not a supplier, and it gates the whole agreement: nothing in STANAG 2818's design and testing obligations applies to an item until a National Authority has decided it counts as "new."

What the agreement excludes

STANAG 2818 states its own boundary plainly. It excludes nuclear munitions and nuclear devices, demolition materiel intended for demolition by means other than explosives, such as by fire, water or mechanical means, improvised explosive devices, booby traps, and training devices that contain explosive materials. A reader working on any of those is outside this agreement from the start, whatever a contract says about AOP-31 or AOP-32.

What informs the agreement

Clause 7 says the STANAG and its AOPs draw on "recent munition technologies such as reduction of vulnerability of munitions", on recently defined environmental loads, on new test techniques, and on "analysis methods for environmental aspects and the assessment of safety and reliability as described in AOP-15, AECTP-100 and ARMP-1." AOP-15 is covered by STANAG 4297, and AECTP-100 is covered by STANAG 4370. ARMP-1, NATO's requirement for reliability and maintainability, is named in the STANAG's own Related Documents list as covered by STANAG 4174; neither ARMP-1 nor STANAG 4174 is in our catalogue. Terms not defined in the STANAG itself follow AAP-6, NATO's standardization glossary, and AOP-38, neither of which is in our catalogue either.

How it is assessed

STANAG 2818 names no accredited certification scheme, and no third party audits an organisation against it. Instead, each nation's National Authority itself decides whether to accept a demolition materiel design for military use, on the basis of the analyses and testing carried out under AOP-32, and that same Authority is the one that classifies whether an item counts as "new demolition materiel" in the first place. That is a government determination on a specific item of materiel, not a certificate an organisation can hold, and results are shared with other NATO nations "upon valid request" rather than published as a scheme anyone can join.

Standards it references

• AECTP-100Background
• STANAG 4370Background
• AOP-15Background
• STANAG 4297Background