Op-ed: FCAS squabble is unfit for a new era

The Franco-German turf war embodies Europe’s strategic failure

On 8 January 1790, George Washington rose to the podium in New York’s Federal Hall to deliver the inaugural State of the Union address. His message: the importance of strategic autonomy. The “safety and interest” of free people, he proclaimed, “require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent on others for essential – particularly for military – supplies.” Perhaps to drive the point home, he wore an American-made suit.

More than two centuries later, the US remains as committed as ever to the principle – and, as its new National Security Strategy makes evident, expects the same from its allies. After eighty years of comfortable complacency under the US security umbrella, Europe must “stand on its own feet… including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense”. The signal is unambiguous: Europe is on its own.

The continent’s political leadership must now act with strategic lucidity and unity of purpose to overcome the learned helpnessness of military dependence on the United States, and they must do so as a matter of urgency: no more fragmented protectionism, no more sacred cows. The recent debacle surrounding the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) is an illustration of what not to do, with a Franco-German squabble risking the derailment of the only sixth-generation fighter project of purely European design.

The crux of the clash is an industrial turf war between France’s Dassault and Airbus Defence and Space, acting as the project’s German coordinator. The French conglomerate had sought to parlay its experience making advanced airframes into an expanded share of the work – and with it, the lucrative intellectual property rights for the associated technology.

When Airbus pushed back, the French government threw its weight behind Dassault’s claims, raising the political stakes. Crunch talks between defence ministers on 11 and 12 December appear to have ended without agreement. But things should never have reached this point in the first place.

The FCAS consortium may limp onwards in a less ambitious configuration, refocused on the development of a common ‘Combat Cloud’ intended to boost interoperability among various future jet projects pursued separately by the states involved. Yet this would further delay any indigenous fighter’s maiden flight, and underscore the deep political malaise at the heart of European defence cooperation – a show of weakness that the continent can ill afford at this strategic turning point.

The cost of dependence

The collapse of the FCAS jet project would leave Europe with few alternatives for a homegrown sixth-gen capability – a critical shortcoming given that it also lacks an indigenous fifth-gen jet, relying instead on America’s F-35. The other horse in the race, the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), counts Italy as the sole EU consortium member, with Leonardo working alongside the UK’s BAE Systems and Japan’s Mitsubishi. A viable Plan B, assuming all goes well, but far from an assured demonstration of European collaboration and home-grown savoir-faire.

The other option is continued dependence on American materiel. This arrangement would surely suit the Trump administration, whose new doctrine makes explicit a shift in role from security guarantor to arms dealer: ‘make money, not war’. In such a situation, Europe’s air defences would be at the mercy of American technical support and built-in kill switches for another generation – an intolerable and expensive strategic failure.

There are already worrying signs that the US is transmogrifying its NATO obligations to Europe into a shake-down on a continental scale, as BIG’s Defence Fellow Claude-France Arnould argued recently, exploiting our status as a captive market for the American defence industry. Nowhere is this clearer than the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), the NATO framework which obliges Europe to buy much-needed weaponry for Ukraine from American suppliers in lieu of direct military aid from Washington.

With European financial capacity already strained, this shift to a subscription model has led to a 43% drop in equipment allocations to Ukraine since July. Incidentally, the racket goes far beyond military gear: witness the EU’s open-ended pledge to invest $600bn in the United States over the course of Trump’s second term, and purchase $750bn of American energy through 2028.

The Trump administration has Europe over a barrel – and they know it. In this grim new reality, the failure of flagship projects like FCAS becomes even harder to countenance. Yet beyond the risks to strategic autonomy in the medium term, the current impasse also holds the threat of more immediate consequences for Europe’s military-industrial sector.

European champions in the wings

The jet consortium’s junior partner – Spain’s Indra – is a major player in its home market and nurtures European-level ambitions; its CEO has made clear that further growth is dependent on broadening its customer base elsewhere on the continent. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has supported those plans with nearly €7 billion in national loans, rightly warning that a blank cheque to American suppliers would undermine Europe’s efforts to cultivate its own defence base.

So long as European states are compelled to ‘buy American’, home-grown defence suppliers like Indra will struggle to reach their full potential. Sánchez’s view might start to take hold among other EU leaders as the implications of the new US National Security Strategy start to sink in. Yet if the FCAS project falls apart, Indra’s efforts to develop its expertise will suffer another blow – this one self-inflicted by Europe.

In the even more immediate term, Ukrainian voices should not go unheard. Oleksandra Azarkhina, who until last year coordinated Ukraine’s logistics hub for military aid in Poland, recently warned that defence procurement and technological exchange at the European level remain dangerously fragmented – largely due to protectionism by national capitals. The FCAS saga suggests her assessment is correct.

US security guarantees once meant that Europe could afford political sideshows at the heart of its defence-industrial architecture. That era is over. Short-sighted wrangling over intellectual property rights should never have been allowed to endanger a project so crucial to the continent’s strategic autonomy.

As George Washington said two centuries ago: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” In the current geopolitical reality, being ill-prepared leaves Europe’s “safety and interest” to the whims of predatory powers on both its flanks.

Martin Leng is Head of Communications at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, the only think tank in Brussels wholly dedicated to geopolitics and strategy.