INTRODUCTION
In June 2026, France and Germany cancelled the New Generation Fighter (henceforth NGF), the manned centrepiece of the Future Combat Air System (henceforth FCAS), a €100 billion programme launched in 2017 as the flagship of a sovereign, integrated European air defence (Archambault, 2026; Defence Blog, 2026a; Mueller, 2025, p. 875). The timing was remarkable: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had redefined European defence priorities and sparked a wave of integration ambitions (Fried, 2026, pp. 9, 11). Confronted with the prospect of a less predictable American commitment and a revisionist, aggressive Russia, Europe launched an unprecedented effort to transform its defence posture. However, this initiative faces a dual challenge: pursuing greater strategic autonomy and increasing operational readiness are objectives that have proven inherently difficult to reconcile (Fried, 2026, pp. 9–11). The swift, large-scale acquisition of off-the-shelf American systems by European states in the war’s aftermath proves this point: between February 2022 and June 2023, 78% of EU weapons acquisitions were placed with non-European manufacturers, with 63% coming from the United States alone. This trend heightened the urgency of FCAS: it was seen as essential to sustaining an autonomous European defence-industrial base that was not dependent on imports (Fried, 2026, p. 26; Ostanina & Tardy, 2024, pp. 4–5).
The EU and its member states have taken significant steps to develop an EU defence industry policy and to enhance cooperation in military capability development. In March 2025, the European Commission published its White Paper for European Defence, framing rearmament as a critical and collective endeavour. As a result, in November 2025, it proposed a ‘Military Schengen’, promising frictionless movement of forces across the continent (Andersson & Britz, 2025, p. 330; European Commission, 2025b; Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport, 2025). Beneath these initiatives lies bolder language, with open discussion of a European defence union and of strategic autonomy in defence procurement and capability development (European Commission, 2025a; Fiott, 2025, p. 826). Money followed words: European defence expenditure has increased at the fastest pace since the Cold War, reaching a record €343 billion in 2024 (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 2025; European Defence Agency, 2025; Fried, 2026, p. 9). Europe had never committed more funding to collective defence or spoken more assertively about strategic autonomy than at the moment its flagship integration programme failed (Fiott, 2025, p. 826; Giumelli & Marx, 2023, p. 589).
This paper investigates why European joint capability development repeatedly stalls over industrial workshare and national requirements, and what that failure implies for the harmonisation of European armed forces. FCAS serves as the central case for examining the broader political economy of European armaments collaboration. The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 diagnoses the structural friction generated by juste retour and divergent strategic cultures. Section 3 tests whether that friction is systemic through comparative cases across the air and land domains. Section 4 evaluates the consequences of industrial fragmentation for interoperability and asks whether emerging digital architectures offer a pragmatic route forward. Section 5 concludes.
About the author
Pietro Proglio is a research trainee at Finabel.