The Spanish Ministry of Defense’s General Directorate of Armament and Material (Dirección General de Armamento y Material, DGAM) and ENAC have signed an agreement aiming to establish a collaboration framework to promote quality and conformity assessment in defense matters by carrying out joint actions.

The importance of the agreement signed by Santiago Ramón González Gómez, General Director of Armament and Material, and José Manuel Prieto Barrio, President of ENAC, lies in the DGAM’s competences as the highest authority in Spanish military standardization, the national authority for the homologation of weapons systems, equipment, and specific-use products in the defense field and the Ministry of Defense laboratories’ qualification body that is part of their network.

To carry out its work, the DGAM must make use of the work of different assessment and control bodies and make decisions based on the results obtained by them, so it needs these bodies to offer a sufficient degree of confidence in their technical competence.

Therefore, the DGAM states in the agreement that "ENAC's accreditation is an excellent tool to guarantee the technical competence of the assessment and control bodies whose results we must rely on, and, in turn, it is the best means to nationally and internationally demonstrate such competence".

Within this agreement's framework, the Ministry of Defense undertakes to inform ENAC about the regulatory developments related to accreditation, publicize the need to refer to ENAC accreditation in the applicable regulations (contracting, certification, test centres, etc.); and grant ENAC accreditations sufficient presumption value in accordance with Spanish military standards and STANAG (NATO Standardization Agreement), among others.

For its part, ENAC will ensure compliance with Spanish military standardization by accrediting the assessment bodies in this action framework, it will offer its technical support for developing conformity assessment schemes and for defense personnel training activities, and it will support the DGAM in operating the Ministry of Defense’s Laboratory Network.