Last month, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz met informally in Cyprus and told their defence ministers to keep working on “a number of areas, covering various topics – not just the fighter jet.” The mediators both governments had appointed weeks earlier had already delivered two separate, incompatible reports.
A German mediator had concluded the joint piloted fighter was no longer viable. The Cyprus summit reproduced, almost word for word, the same non-decision Berlin and Paris had reached twelve months before.
The Future Combat Air System, known in French as the Système de Combat Aérien du Futur, was a trilateral programme among France, Germany, and Spain to field a sixth-generation air combat system by around 2040. Launched in 2017, the programme absorbed more than €3.2 billion in Phase 1 design funding and carried a projected lifetime cost of €100 billion. France’s Dassault Aviation led the core fighter pillar, Germany’s Airbus led the combat cloud, and Spain’s Indra headed sensor development.
The equal-footing mega-programme ran on industrial politics at a time operational planning should have come first. The deals closing this week point to a more workable model operating quietly alongside the wreckage.
What the Industrial War Was Really About
The workshare dispute was, in truth, a collision between two different industrial histories.
Dassault built the Rafale without a foreign partner and demanded programme leadership commensurate with that experience. Airbus, representing German and Spanish industrial interests, sought a distributed governance model closer to the Eurofighter Typhoon arrangement.
Germany’s aerospace lobby warned Berlin it risked losing its industrial base if France took the leading role. The French side countered that Germany lacked the capacity to build a combat aircraft at all. Both assessments were largely accurate.
Merz brought the doctrine gap into the open in February, noting that France needs a next-generation jet capable of carrying nuclear weapons and conducting carrier operations – capabilities that Germany does not currently need in its military.
As it happens, no workshare formula can bridge a gap that wide, because the mismatch runs through decades of divergent security history, not a contractor scheduling dispute. Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken said: “FCAS is dead according to the German Chancellor.” Macron publicly denied that at Cyprus, and both governments gave their defence ministries a few more weeks. The programme’s industrial substance had already closed.
France and Sweden Exchange Hardware
The deals concluded around the Cyprus summit tell a different story from the one dominating the headlines.
Sweden announced the purchase of four Frégate de Défense et d’Intervention frigates from France’s Naval Group for roughly $4.25 billion, with the first delivery expected in 2030 and the order beating competing proposals from Spain’s Navantia and Britain’s Babcock International. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the purchase would triple his country’s naval air-defence capacity and represented one of the country’s biggest defence investments since the Gripen fighter jet in the 1980s.
The day before that announcement, France’s Direction Générale de l’Armement signed a contract with a joint Swedish consortium of Saab and Scania France. The deal covered 16 Giraffe 1X Advanced Detection Radar Systems mounted on Scania V3P tactical vehicles, replacing French army low-level detection capability dating to 1995.
France left with Swedish radar and ground vehicles, and Sweden gained French frigates. Neither transaction needed a multilateral governance framework.
Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment have described an accelerating move toward smaller European defence arrangements driven by matched operational need. Germany’s European Sky Shield Initiative draws in several NATO allies; France and Italy cooperate on jointly built frigates; seven countries jointly procure armoured vehicles at scale.
In each arrangement, participating countries settled what they needed before deciding who would build it.
The European Army That Isn’t
Public appetite for collective European defence has grown, and the polling captures something real.
The EU Barometer recorded 81% backing for a common EU defence and security policy in spring last year, the highest reading since 2004, and recent polling across Germany (59%), Spain (58%), Denmark (56%), and France (55%) put majority support for a European army incorporating national forces. The numbers point to genuine anxiety in populations whose security environment has grown markedly more dangerous.
What the numbers cannot resolve is the command-structure problem that the Future Combat Air System made concrete. A common army presupposes common doctrine and common procurement, and FCAS made visible exactly how hard that is given divergent core military needs.
Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations has noted that “the most important questions to solve are decision-making and European command structures.” Fix meant that European forces still operate within North Atlantic Treaty Organisation architecture, with no independent command in place, and the institutional gap between political aspiration and operational organisation is wider than any single programme can bridge.
Better Exchange Models
The one piece of FCAS that might still survive is the combat cloud, the networked data architecture linking fighters, drones, and ground systems.
Airbus chief Guillaume Faury argued that the programme is “at its core, a combat cloud,” insisting that the deadlock over the fighter pillar should not extinguish the broader system’s ambitions. If France advances a national or near-national fighter and Germany joins a different consortium, a shared cloud architecture remains the potential connective layer between platforms that need not be identical.
The France-Sweden exchange models that reasoning in miniature. Sweden’s new frigates will carry Swedish Saab RBS15 missiles alongside French Aster 30 air-defence systems, with Saab radar integrated into the vessel and interoperability embedded in the hardware itself. Sweden has also expanded its Arctic military presence considerably, a build-up that now connects directly to France’s growing naval export ambitions and strengthens both sides in the process.
European defence will not converge on a single army or a single fighter in the near term. It will grow through a web of bilateral and mini-lateral arrangements, underwritten by the European Commission’s Security Action for Europe lending facility and led by operational needs.
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