To avoid an alliance divided into first- and second-class armies, NATO plans to launch more than 20 joint projects to share costs of military hardware and promote a new mindset on weapons buying, according to a top French general.

With defense budgets under pressure, the initiative -- dubbed "smart defense" -- will be a top priority when NATO members gather in Chicago for an alliance summit on May 20-21, General Stephane Abrial told AFP in an interview.

As head of Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, the first European to fill the post, Abrial has been assigned the task of putting the idea of cooperation into action.

The concept is straightforward: with economic troubles forcing a decline in military spending among all the allies, "it is more and more difficult in all the alliance countries to acquire, much less to maintain capabilities" necessary to carry out NATO military missions, he said.

And when it comes to defense, the gap between the United States and its European allies is steadily growing, with America accounting for about 75 percent of all NATO military spending.

The NATO-led air war in Libya last year drove home the transatlantic disparity and the stark realities for Europe's armed forces: a serious shortage of aerial refueling tankers, surveillance drones and precision-guided bombs.

NATO officials hope the "smart defense" program will help rectify the problem, by setting priorities, pooling limited resources and coordinating investments.

One of the projects to be unveiled in Chicago, led by Denmark, focuses on the "joint management of munitions," said Abrial, the former chief of the French air force.

"One could imagine a framework based on an agreement between countries, eventually to acquire jointly or store what they already have in a single warehouse, and share the costs of the storage and maintenance," he said.

Each government would have the right to draw from the stockpile based on the level of their contribution.

"In the past, countries would sit around a table and would put together a kind of wish list of things that we lacked and which we would work toward," he said. "Then the next phase of realizing the plan would be more or less unpredictable."

But now the approach is the different, he said.

"We went to these countries, and in each case we have asked them what they would like to do," in which area or which country do they want to cooperate with on projects for new equipment or training, he said.

To promote efficiency and concrete results, the projects are led by small teams and organized with a limited number of participating governments, between "three and eight countries maximum," he said.

The task for NATO is to coordinate the various projects and ensure the outcome fits in with the alliance's needs, while overcoming concerns about sovereignty and competition for local defense industries.

"The big advantage of this initiative is that it reconciles the national interests of each country and the collective interests of the alliance," he said.

In Chicago, heads of state plan to endorse "20 to 25 projects that we will start to put in place immediately afterward," he said.

"These projects will serve as a demonstration of the concept that will allow us to view Chicago not as an end in and of itself, but as a launching pad, a springboard for changing our mindset" on how to move the alliance forward, he said.

A number of projects are concentrated on expanding training, for helicopter pilots, ground crews and mountain warfare at an instruction center in Slovenia.

"These projects are starting at a relatively modest level, the goal being to put the new ideas into practice, and without making them too complex, too long or, of course, too expensive," he said.

In a second round, "one could take on much more complex projects, of longer duration and with a more significant budget," said Abrial.

For now, the general and NATO's leaders hope fiscal and strategic realities will persuade member states to sacrifice a degree of sovereign control in return for a stronger -- and less lopsided -- military alliance.