The European Commission has made public the 2019 report of the Horizon 2020 Protection and Security Advisory Group (PASAG) on "Optimising access to dual-use R&T and R&D results for security".
In this paper the PASAG Group goes through the analysis of a potential scope for dual use within the current and future defence research and development programmes (PADR/EDIDP and EDF) to understand whether there are areas within which to increase the coordination and synergies between security and defence programmes.
In this regard, the PASAG concludes that there is significant potential for a more focused effort to identify dual use R&D opportunities that would benefit both the defence and the civil security domains and it recommends that the EC undertakes a structured analysis of the dual opportunity, identifying the scope and domains of application and establishing appropriate processes and mechanisms to enable the exploitation of the relevant synergies.
Moreover, based on the assumption that synergies between the security and defence R&T and R&D programmes should be promoted only in the specific areas of common/dual interest (e.g. maritime surveillance, border surveillance, CBRN, cyber security, autonomous systems), the PASAG report addresses the access to dual-use R&T and R&D results for security stakeholders at the EU level and provides strategic and technical recommendations for optimising such access.
For instance, the report suggests that security and defence users should share their respective operational capability needs and gaps in those areas of common interest and identify common dedicated technology and systems development road maps. This, in turn, would allow security and defence actors to gain a much wider knowledge of the respective projects and results and would therefore ensure to reduce duplication and maximize public investment in research and development.
Within this context, the most important recommendation provided by the Group to the EC is to undertake a number of short and long-term measures aimed at increasing the strategic coordination between security and defence research and development programmes in order to avoid possible risks of duplication of (public) investments within areas of dual interest and also to improve the synchronisation of topics between the respective work programmes.
The complete report is available here.