The Allied Quality Assurance Publications, known collectively as the AQAP suite, are the contractual backbone of quality management in NATO defence procurement. STANAG 4107 governs them, contracting authorities across the Alliance mandate them, and they align to ISO 9001:2015. What follows sets out how the system works, which publications are in force, and where it stops working in ammunition and explosives procurement.
The Governance Architecture
Two NATO committees own this ground, and they rarely meet in the middle. That separation is not an administrative curiosity. It is the source of most of the compliance risk in ammunition procurement, and the rest of this guide turns on it.
AC/327: The LCMG
The NATO Life Cycle Management Group (LCMG), formally designated AC/327, is the body responsible for STANAG 4107 and the entire AQAP suite. AC/327 Working Group 2 develops and maintains AQAP publications, aligning them with successive editions of ISO 9001. When a contract references AQAP-2110, the intellectual ownership of that requirement sits with AC/327. What AC/327 governs is the quality management system: process documentation, audit trails, measurement systems, management review. Not technical product knowledge.
AC/326: The CASG
The NATO Conventional Ammunition Safety Group (CASG), formally designated AC/326, owns the ammunition safety standards: the STANAG 4440/4442/4657 series and the Allied Ammunition Storage and Transport Publication (AASTP) series. Where AC/327 governs how a supplier runs its quality system, AC/326 governs whether the ammunition is safe to make, store and transport. No instrument bridges the two. A GQAR working to AC/327 frameworks is not thereby equipped to evaluate the safety case for a propellant formulation or a fuze design, yet on an ammunition contract the same individual is routinely expected to do both.
STANAG 4107 in Practice
STANAG 4107, currently at Edition 11 (15 January 2019), is a mandate rather than a technical specification. It requires contracting nations to state which AQAP publications apply to a given contract. For most defence production contracts the answer is AQAP-2110 Edition D. A contract that cites STANAG 4107 and stops there is incomplete: the contracting officer still has to make an explicit selection from the current suite.
The Current AQAP Suite
Eight AQAPs are in force. Three carry most of the weight for procurement practitioners.
AQAP-2110 Ed.D
This is the workhorse. AQAP-2110 covers quality management requirements for design, development and production, supplementing ISO 9001:2015 with defence-specific clauses on Government Furnished Property (GFP), Key Characteristics management, Configuration Management, First Article Inspection (FAI) and the Critical Safety Item (CSI) control regime. Any supplier producing defence hardware under a NATO contract meets AQAP-2110 as the primary contractual quality requirement. Compliance means demonstrable ISO 9001:2015 certification plus documented AQAP-specific procedures against each supplement clause.
AQAP-2070 Ed.B
AQAP-2070 governs the Government Quality Assurance Representative (GQAR) process: how one NATO nation provides in-country QA oversight of a supplier on behalf of another. Buy ammunition from a French manufacturer into UK stock and a French GQAR performs surveillance at the production facility, then certifies conformance on the UK’s behalf. AQAP-2070 sets the delegation protocol, the surveillance scope and the reporting obligations. Anyone running a cross-border supply chain needs to know it, which in practice means anyone buying NATO-standard ammunition at scale.
AQAP-2131 Ed.C
AQAP-2131 applies where the customer holds design authority and the supplier builds to specification. It is lighter than AQAP-2110 on design and development, but gives no ground on production quality management, inspection and test. Licensed production is the usual case: a mature design manufactured under licence by a new supplier.
Cancelled Publications: A Warning
Three AQAPs are cancelled and must not appear in current contracts: AQAP-2009, AQAP-2120 and AQAP-2130. Finding them in a draft contract or Statement of Work tells you the template has not been touched since before 2015. Send it back for revision before award.
The Competence Gap
The framework’s largest systemic weakness in ammunition and explosives is the mismatch between the quality management framework (AC/327) and the technical knowledge needed to judge ammunition safety and performance (AC/326).
ISO 9001 Clause 7.2 requires that organisations “determine the necessary competence of person(s) doing work under its control that affects the quality of outputs.” That wording is deliberately non-prescriptive: ISO defines competence for no sector at all. AQAP-2110 Ed.D inherits the requirement without amplifying it for ammunition. Neither AC/327 nor AC/326 has issued a binding competence standard setting out what a GQAR or a procurement officer must know about energetics, fuze mechanisms, hazard classification or ammunition lot testing before discharging QA obligations on an ammunition contract.
Three frameworks could bridge the gap in principle: the International Ammunition Technical Guidelines (IATG 01.90 Version 3, 2021) on personnel competence; the Explosives Safety Alliance (ESA) National Occupational Standards, Key Role 6 (Procurement); and ISO 9001:2015 Clause 7.2 used as a vehicle for sector-specific competence definition. None binds NATO contracting authorities. Whether any of them should, and which committee would own it, is the question neither lane has picked up — which is the whole problem. ISC has published detailed analysis of this gap through its Standards and Regulation intelligence feed.
Practical Application for Procurement Teams
Four things follow for procurement officers and contracting authorities on ammunition and explosives contracts.
- Specify the AQAP. Referencing STANAG 4107 alone is not a specification. AQAP-2110 for production contracts; AQAP-2131 where the scope is final inspection only.
- Verify GQAR competence rather than assuming it. If the GQAR will be asked to judge ammunition-specific technical risk, confirm the credentials behind that judgement: IATG training, ESA NOS certification or equivalent.
- Check for cancelled AQAPs. 2009, 2120 and 2130. If they appear in draft documentation, correct before issue.
- Define First Article Inspection scope in the contract Data Item Description. AQAP-2110 does not prescribe FAI scope. That is a contracting decision, and it has to be made explicit.
ISC provides advisory support on AQAP compliance, STANAG 4107 interpretation, and GQAR competence framework development through our Standards and Competency consulting practice. Our WOME and ammunition technical training addresses the competence gap directly: the technical grounding the AQAP framework assumes procurement teams already have.