Germany has approved 400 million euros ($539.9 million) of funding to help build a ground surveillance system that Nato partners hope to operate from 2012, a German official told Reuters on Wednesday.
The Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS), a system allowing Nato to survey wide surface areas from high altitude using hardware including unmanned drones, will be based on the southern Italian island of Sicily.
Approval for the project was granted under the condition that any increase in Germanys contribution would have to be approved by an appropriations committee, which will be informed of bids in an interim report, the official on the committee said under condition of anonymity. The project, agreed by defence ministers in February, will cost 17 participating nations from the North Atlantic alliance around 1.5 billion euros in total.
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