41. Stresses the need to explore ways of improving energy efficiency and environmental management within the armed forces at home and abroad by exploiting, among others, the potential offered by renewable energy sources; recalls that the armed forces of a single EU Member State consume the energy of a large European city and that military structures, therefore, should be equally innovative in reducing their ecological footprint; welcomes the report “Greening the Blue Helmets: Environment, Na ...[+++]tural Resources and UN Peacekeeping Operations”, released in May 2012 by UNEP, the United Nations Department for Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) and the United Nation Department of Field Support (UNDFS); points to the fact that, for several years, the USarmed forces have been actively seeking to increase energy independence by using sustainable energy sources and increasing energy efficiency in all army operations and infrastructure; welcomes, in this respect, the recent EDA project GO GREEN, which aims at significantly improving energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources; underlines the need also to develop guidelines for best practises in the field of resource efficiency and the monitoring of environmental management for CSDP missions;

35. Recommends that Member States commit themselves fully to the provision and sustainability of military capabilities, matching the trend towards growing emphasis on the qualitative aspects; endorses the requests made at the Ghent informal Defence Ministers' meeting and in the German-Swedish paper and the Weimar initiative and calls for the operative phase to begin without delay, in line with the December 2010 Council conclusions, in which the Defence Ministers agreed that the EDA should intensify its work to facilitate the identification of areas for pooling and sharing military capabilities, including through the support of a team of wise men; stresses the need to make this new approach to capability development a success; calls on th ...[+++]e Member States to respect the deadline set by the December 2010 Council; recalls that the Chiefs of Staff of the EU armed forces have been tasked to screen their capabilities by May 2011, that the EU Military Staff has been commissioned to use this data for producing an overview by mid-2011 and that EU Ministers of Defence will reach final conclusions by the end of this year; calls on the Agency to make this new initiative its priority and to list potential new cooperation projects (for instance in areas such as satellite communications, medical support, naval logistics and cyber security) so as to avoid overlapping of costs and increase interoperability;

Several countries have developed or are developing their own Earth observation (EO) systems: France (since 1986 with SPOT 1 until Helios B and Pleiades), Italy (Cosmo-SkyMed), Germany (SAR-Lupe), Spain (SEOSAT, in the framework of the European GMES project), Sweden (SVEA project, still waiting for Armed Forces authorization), Great Britain (Topsat).

As I said, this project is run in Turkey by the Turkish armed forces and therefore this should clarify the point made by the honourable Member concerning where this project and programme is being run.

The programme has the following development focuses: - Use for new purposes of military facilities: this involves the rehabilitation and restructuring for commercial purposes of land and premises previously used by the military, consulting assistance for municipalities affected by the rundown in armed forces, and project management and tourist schemes.

Frankly, the United States cannot be everywhere; there are limits even to the amount of power that the United States Armed Forces can project.