The operation, which would add to a training mission that France has started alone, could be approved when defense and foreign ministers meet in November.

"Our naval effort is a great success and there's a consensus to move forward on a wider mission," Franz Josef Jung, Germany's defense minister, said during a break in a meeting of EU defense ministers in Goteborg, Sweden.

Atalanta, the EU?s first naval mission, has been patrolling Somalia's coast since December, trying to dampen a surge in piracy attacks in waters that handle about a 10th of world trade. Some 100 merchant ships a day transit the Gulf of Aden, a choke point leading to the Suez Canal.

"There's lots of interest in a broader mission," said Sten Tolgfors, Sweden's defense minister and the host of the meeting. The two-day informal gathering isn't empowered to make any decision. Any formal agreement must await a Nov. 16-17 meeting of defense and foreign ministers in Brussels.

Javier Solana, the 27-member EU's foreign policy chief, said military officers in August visited Uganda and Djibouti, two potential sites for the training missions.

French training

France is training about 500 members of the security guard of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the president of Somalia's interim government. While his administration is recognized by the United Nations and is protected by soldiers from the African Union, it controls only parts of the country around the capital Mogadishu.

Islamist rebels hold much of the center and south of the country, including some Mogadishu neighborhoods, while two breakaway republics make up much of the north. Islamists are holding a French adviser training the Somali guards hostage after abducting him and a colleague in July. The other escaped.

The lack of a central government in Somalia has allowed pirates to operate out of lawless ports. Pirates have attacked vessels off the coast of Somalia about 140 times so far this year, with a surge in April and May, the U.S. Navy said. A total of 28 ships have been seized this year, and pirates are still holding four vessels for ransom.

Monsoon winds

The past three months have seen a drop in piracy because high monsoon winds kicked up waves that the pirates' light skiffs couldn't handle.

"The weather is now back on the side of the pirates," Rear Admiral Peter Hudson of Britain's Royal Navy, Atalanta's commander, said in an interview at the Goteborg meeting. "Piracy is never going to be solved on the sea alone. The solution rests onland in Somalia."