Germany — European Union members have admitted the United States into a project aimed at quickening the flow of military personnel and equipment across the continent, hoping the move will open a new front in trans-Atlantic cooperation.

The defense ministers’ May 6 approval at a meeting at NATO”S headquarters begins a test case for a relatively new set of rules about non-EU countries partaking in the bloc’s –1---.

Ministers also approved –2-- and Norway’s applications to the mobility initiative.

Besides the project’s tangible objectives — streamlining the red tape for quickly shipping a tank from Lisbon to Talinn, for example — officials celebrated the Pentagon’s inclusion as the beginning of an actual U.S.-EU defense agenda.

The task of ferrying troops and weapons around Europe in the event of an attack has been part of NATO’s defense calculus for decades, and the alliance maintains deft capabilities to that effect. The EU military mobility effort aims to augment that work while offering the EU-NATO relationship a concrete deliverable at the same time.

Within the EU bureaucracy, the European Defence Agency included the subject on its to-do list under the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence process.

The goal is to streamline customs procedures and cross-border clearances, he explained, as well as shrink the lead time for all air and ground transport to five days.

Officials here are zeroing in on military mobility, partly because the subject is expected to spur improvements in related civilian fields like technology and data connectivity, in cyber defense, and in the upkeep of transportation infrastructure.

The idea is to “take the strategic dimension of the EU out of the purely military circles into a wider context,” said João Gomes Cravinho, Portugal’s defense minister. Portugal holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, with Slovenia taking over in July