Germany has pulled out of the joint Franco-German Future Combat Air System programme, the flagship European defence cooperation initiative conceived in 2017 by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. Berlin announced the decision first, stating that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had “suggested” abandoning the project after a summit last week where both leaders concluded the two prime contractors — France’s Dassault Aviation and Airbus, representing Germany and Spain — “cannot reach an agreement.” The Élysée Palace expressed “regrets” while reaffirming its commitment to Franco-German defence cooperation. The programme was conceived as a manned next-generation fighter jet, supported by new engines, sensors, and a “combat cloud” digital intelligence network. Germany’s defection leaves France the option of continuing with a national programme or seeking new partners. RUSI air power analyst Christoph Bergs noted the project was “conceived in a different world.”
The received wisdom
The liberal-internationalist account of the FCAS failure frames it as a casualty of the new nationalism: Germany, flush with post-Ukraine defence spending, asserting its interests against French industrial ambitions; the old Franco-German engine of European integration stalling under pressure from sovereignist politics and Trump-era transatlanticism. On this reading, the failure is a symptom of a broader European disease — the inability to pool sovereignty even when survival logic demands it — and the remedy is more political will, better institutional design, deeper EU defence integration. The collapse of FCAS, on this view, is a tragedy at exactly the wrong moment, with Russian aggression ongoing and American commitment to NATO wavering.
The Macron camp in particular can point to the timeline: the programme was nearly a decade in the making, Merz was the one who raised doubts publicly in February 2025 — asking whether a manned fighter jet would still be needed in twenty years given drones — and Berlin’s announcement came first, before any shared communiqué. France, on this reading, was ambushed by a partner that wanted out and chose a summit to stage its exit.
A different read
The honest post-mortem is less flattering to either party, and more revealing about the structural limits of European defence cooperation as currently conceived.
The design disagreements were real and fundamental. France wanted a small, light aircraft capable of launching from the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier — the requirements of a global naval power with power-projection doctrine. Germany wanted a larger aircraft for air superiority over European airspace. These are not minor differences in specification; they reflect genuinely divergent strategic concepts. A country that sees its primary military challenge as defending its eastern border against Russia has different requirements from a country that needs to project force to the Sahel. Trying to satisfy both requirements in a single airframe is engineering by committee, which in weapons development typically produces something that does neither job well.
The industrial disputes compounded this. Dassault Aviation, France’s proud national champion in combat aviation, had designed and built the Rafale with minimal foreign partnership and was reluctant to share real intellectual property or operational control with German and Spanish partners who brought money but not comparable expertise. The accusations that Dassault “pushed for an outsized leadership role” are credible given the company’s history and culture. European defence cooperation repeatedly founders on this same structural problem: the firms with the most relevant expertise have the least incentive to share it, because their national championship status depends on maintaining that edge.
Merz’s question about manned fighter jets is actually the most interesting element of the story, and worth taking seriously. The shift toward autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons platforms — drones, loitering munitions, AI-directed systems — is real, and the Ukraine war has accelerated it. The question of whether a $100 billion-plus programme to develop a 2040s-era manned fighter makes sense in a world where drone swarms are being used effectively against armoured columns is genuinely open. If the FCAS were being conceived today rather than in 2017, it is not obvious that either government would propose a manned platform as the centrepiece.
The deeper problem is that European defence cooperation has consistently been organised around industrial politics rather than strategic requirements. FCAS was conceived partly to reset Franco-German relations after a period of bilateral friction — Macron said at the 2017 launch that “we’re not afraid of revolutions” — not primarily because there was a joint strategic assessment concluding that a shared fighter jet was the optimal platform for the threat environment. When the industrial politics sour, as they inevitably do when large defence contracts are at stake, the strategic rationale is not strong enough to hold the partnership together.
This is the pattern across European defence: the F-35 procurement decisions that split allied interests, the A400M transport aircraft programme that ran chronically over budget and under-capability, the various failed helicopter and armoured vehicle initiatives. The successes — the Eurofighter Typhoon, which actually exists and flies — required extraordinary political effort to sustain, and even it was plagued by cost overruns and capability compromises. Europe has not failed at defence cooperation for lack of intention or resources. It has failed because the institutional architecture that European defence cooperation requires — a genuine common strategic concept, supranational procurement authority, and a willingness to let the best industrial solution win rather than the most nationally balanced one — does not exist and is politically impossible to create in the near term.
What exists instead are bilateral and multilateral projects assembled from national contributions, where every country’s industrial base gets its percentage of the workshare and every country’s strategic culture gets its veto. The FCAS collapse is not anomalous. It is the system working as designed.
What to watch
Watch whether France now approaches the UK about rejoining elements of the FCAS or related combat air work — the UK’s own GCAP programme, being developed with Italy and Japan, offers a potential partnership framework. Watch how Germany proceeds: a direct procurement of American F-35s would be the path of least resistance but would confirm that Germany has chosen transatlantic over European defence sovereignty. Watch also for whether the remaining “core” FCAS elements — the digital combat cloud, the new engine — can survive as standalone projects, or whether the fighter’s cancellation hollows out the broader programme’s rationale.
— J