NATO Question

In the entire history of NATO, has their ever been an attempt at some kind of jointly developed, standardized weapons or vehicles?

To clarify, something like weapons manufacturers from all the members of NATO coming together to design say . . . an assault rifle, tank, or jet meant to be adopted by every member of NATO?

Essentially making it so whenever these nations cooperate they're all using the same weapons and the like, so they all can rely on each other to provide ammo, spare parts, etc etc.

Would this even be a good idea?

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And so it fits the AH criteria . . . If this has never happened, is there any way something like this could have happened?

If so, and assuming it happened early on in the Cold War era, how might this level of standardization have affected the conflicts that did occur during the Cold War?
 
On top of my head, the US and West Germans basically developed the M1 Abrams and Leopard 2 vis-a-vis the MBT-70 joint project. Leopard 2 got adopted by a number of NATO countries over time, moreso than the Abrams. Then there's the adoption of the NATO 5.56mm ammunition for firearms.

Shogo said:
If so, and assuming it happened early on in the Cold War era, how might this level of standardization have affected the conflicts that did occur during the Cold War?

Not much. Main element of the Cold War was always the nukes, and the superpowers themselves bearing brunt of the fighting in hotspots; Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan spring to mind.
 

abc123

Banned
In the entire history of NATO, has their ever been an attempt at some kind of jointly developed, standardized weapons or vehicles?

To clarify, something like weapons manufacturers from all the members of NATO coming together to design say . . . an assault rifle, tank, or jet meant to be adopted by every member of NATO?

Essentially making it so whenever these nations cooperate they're all using the same weapons and the like, so they all can rely on each other to provide ammo, spare parts, etc etc.

Would this even be a good idea?

-----------------

And so it fits the AH criteria . . . If this has never happened, is there any way something like this could have happened?

If so, and assuming it happened early on in the Cold War era, how might this level of standardization have affected the conflicts that did occur during the Cold War?

NATO has standardised A LOT of things, but you can't force some country to buy some airplane/tank/ship...
That's WP where things are like that.
;)
 
I understand that stanardisation was the plan for NATO. It's just that member countries never co-operated so it didn't quite work. I seem to recall a joke at the time that the only thing NATO did standardise was the beer :D
 
The Fiat G91 fighter bomber was another attempt at a NATO standard aircraft. Italy and West Germany used them along with Portugal. The F86, F104 and later the F16 came closest I think. Some aircraft were so widely used that they were more or less NATO standard
 
In the entire history of NATO, has their ever been an attempt at some kind of jointly developed, standardized weapons or vehicles?

To clarify, something like weapons manufacturers from all the members of NATO coming together to design say . . . an assault rifle, tank, or jet meant to be adopted by every member of NATO?

Essentially making it so whenever these nations cooperate they're all using the same weapons and the like, so they all can rely on each other to provide ammo, spare parts, etc etc.

Would this even be a good idea?

-----------------

And so it fits the AH criteria . . . If this has never happened, is there any way something like this could have happened?

If so, and assuming it happened early on in the Cold War era, how might this level of standardization have affected the conflicts that did occur during the Cold War?

Others seem to have answered most of this, but I'll chip in my $0.01:

Yes, quite a few projects have been started, many with the ambitious and not very realistic goal of being used by every NATO power. A lot of those have turned into actual common or near-common hardware used by multiple NATO members.

Yes, it is a good idea since it greatly simplifies logistics. If you're using a rifle that fires .303 British than all the .30-06 cartridges in the world don't do you any good. Another benefit is that units with common weapons can coordinate better. Economies of scale mean that these weapons are often cheaper. If you can go one step further and get common or near-common Tables of Organization and Equipment (TO&E), then you GREATLY improve unit coordination on the battlefield.

Warsaw Pact units didn't just use mostly the same equipment, they also mostly used the same TO&E. So if a Soviet commander needed a tank regiment, he could 'plug in' an East German tank regiment in place of a Soviet tank regiment with fewer concerns than a US commander would have trying to plug a Belgian battalion in place of one of his own.

NATO was pretty successful at standardizing ammunition, BTW. 155mm howitzers were the dominant field artillery caliber, and first 105mm and then 120mm tank guns, 5.56NATO and 7.62NATO rifle cartridges, etc.
 
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