Anyone who wants to be taken seriously in the European defense industry shows up to Eurosatory, France’s largest defense trade show, held every two years. This week, the industry is once again showcasing its latest advances at the sprawling exhibition grounds in Villepinte, near Paris. More than 2,000 exhibitors mingle with military officials, politicians, and industry professionals.
With order books full, the mood should be upbeat. European governments want to reduce their defense dependency on the United States and are investing hundreds of billions of euros to advance that goal.
However, the prevailing optimism is being tempered by disappointment. Europe’s most ambitious defense project aimed at greater strategic autonomy effectively collapsed just days ago: Germany and France dealt what appears to be a fatal blow to their joint sixth-generation fighter aircraft program. The centerpiece of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) will not be built as a joint project after all.
Is the FCAS flop a watershed moment?
French Defense Minister Catherine Vautrin avoided the subject in her opening speech on Monday. Nevertheless, there are growing signs that Paris and Berlin have become deadlocked not only over the fighter jet program, but also their joint battle tank project.
President Emmanuel Macron and former Chancellor Angela Merkel launched FCAS in 2017 in response to Brexit and the election of US President Donald Trump to the White House. The fighter aircraft initiative was accompanied by a Franco-German tank program called the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS). Under the arrangement, France was to take the lead on the fighter jet project, while Germany would oversee the tank program.
Since then, President Macron has repeatedly warned that if FCAS fails, MGCS could ultimately suffer the same fate.
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France and Germany shifting from consensus to competition
Last weekend, Armin Papperger, head of Germany’s largest defense company Rheinmetall, fueled the uncertainty. Papperger told Welt am Sonntag that Paris is considering drastically cutting funding for the project, but said that no final decision has been made.
“I take these warnings very seriously,” said Ulrike Franke of the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Paris, speaking to the German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. She added that the tank project has faced increasing difficulties and progressed more slowly than FCAS from the outset.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Defense Ministry said that Germany and France had agreed to continue developing MGCS in a “platform-independent” manner and to focus on the program’s core elements. Whether that effectively renders a joint main battle tank obsolete remains an open question, a ministry spokesperson said Monday.
Franke sees several parallels with the failed aircraft project. As with the fighter jet program, differing military requirements in the two countries are complicating efforts to develop a joint tank. The German military prioritizes maximum protection and firepower for NATO’s eastern flank, while France has favored lighter tanks that can be airlifted for rapid intervention missions.
A battle for technological leadership
Yet the most striking parallels lie within the defense industry itself, which German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius openly blames for the collapse of FCAS.
“At the government level, our hands were tied. The German and French governments would very much have liked to continue the project,” Pistorius said.
In the FCAS program, French aerospace group Dassault Aviation is widely seen as a difficult partner that politicians were unable to rein in. “From the very beginning, not everyone was on the same wavelength,” said Cedric Perrin, chairman of the Defense Committee in the French Senate.
A drawn-out dispute over intellectual property rights and project leadership ultimately became a battle for future technological dominance in the defense sector.
A similar dilemma has emerged in the MGCS tank project. Here, the dominant player is not Dassault but Rheinmetall, Europe’s leading ammunition producer.
The project was originally intended to be led by the Franco-German joint venture KNDS, which combines Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and France’s Nexter.
However, Germany later pushed through Rheinmetall’s participation with strong political backing. The company aims to become Europe’s largest defense manufacturer by 2030. From the French perspective, Rheinmetall’s involvement has significantly altered the project’s delicate power balance.
Rheinmetall’s rise
Rheinmetall had already signaled its impatience with the slow-moving political process at the Eurosatory defense fair four years ago, when it unexpectedly unveiled the Panther KF51 in Paris as an alternative to the joint MGCS tank project.
The advanced system is now being aggressively marketed and is said to be close to securing a major order from Italy. From a business perspective, the move is rational. But it undermines pressure to reach compromises within the Franco-German joint project. On Monday, KNDS also unveiled a tank for the French army based on the Leopard 2 platform.
The industry’s problems extend beyond the two flagship projects. The Eurodrone program, which is being jointly developed by Germany, France, Italy and Spain, has also run into trouble.
Rising costs and delays have slowed progress. While the design phase has been completed, doubts are growing in France in particular about the program’s cost and military value. The Eurodrone project has not failed, but it nevertheless serves as a cautionary example of the challenges facing Europe’s efforts at defense cooperation.
Fears of German dominance
The fact that multinational defense programs are stagnating while Germany’s defense industry is pushing ahead has not gone unnoticed in Paris. Concerns about growing German industrial dominance have become a central source of frustration along the Seine.
French Senator Cedric Perrin summed up the growing estrangement between the two neighbors: “We have moved from diverging ambitions to competing ambitions.”
Germany’s vision for the future of the defense sector is increasingly focused on its national interests, aimed at dramatically expanding its domestic defense-industrial base, Perrin argued. Berlin is drawing much of the financial firepower for those ambitions from the billions of euros provided through its special defense fund.
The widening Franco-German rift and its implications for Europe are a major topic at this week’s defense exhibition in Paris. Europe’s industry may be capable of producing world-class weapons systems. But as long as national industrial interests drive decision-making, European defense cooperation is likely to remain inefficient and vulnerable to setbacks.
And that, at the end of the day, will do little to reduce the burden on taxpayers.
This article was originally published in German.
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