A hundred-billion-euro gamble is teetering on the edge, with Paris and Berlin locked in a tug-of-war for control.
The Future Combat Air System (FCAS), Europe’s much-touted sixth-generation fighter jet and integrated air-combat network, was supposed to be the crown jewel of the continent’s push for “strategic autonomy.” It was billed as the answer to America’s F-35, China’s stealth programs, and Japan’s partnership with Britain and Italy. Instead, the project has become a symbol of Europe’s inability to keep its defense ambitions from being hijacked by national rivalries.
The rift is hardly new. Paris and Berlin have long sparred over how far Europe should go in relying on its own defense industry. The latest flashpoint came when Germany opted to buy weapons for Ukraine from U.S. firms—a move France blasted as a betrayal of the “Buy European” principle. That dispute pales in comparison to the bitter fight now raging over FCAS itself.
On paper, Dassault Aviation of France, Airbus Defence and Space of Germany, and Spain’s Indra are supposed to be equal partners. In practice, Paris has called most of the shots. Now France is pressing for a larger stake in the program—one that would give it veto power over exports. In Berlin, that looks less like cooperation and more like an attempt to lock in French dominance over Europe’s most important defense project.
The politics are impossible to ignore. Germany has inched closer to Washington in recent years, stoking French doubts about its reliability. If Boeing pushes its own sixth-generation platform onto the market, will Berlin hold the line for FCAS—or fold under American pressure? The original mission—leapfrogging the U.S. in air-combat technology—already feels diluted.
The numbers are staggering: more than €100 billion by 2040. FCAS isn’t just a plane. It’s a whole war-fighting ecosystem—manned jets working in tandem with drones, cloud-based battle management, artificial intelligence coordinating every move. The vision is bold: Europe not just catching up, but setting the pace in military aviation.
But the project’s history shows how fragile that vision is. Britain, once part of the conversation, walked away to team up with Italy and Japan on the rival Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP)—a venture that, by most accounts, is moving faster. Instead of unity, Europe may end up with competing flagship projects, each jealously guarded by its own national champions.
The fate of FCAS is bigger than one aircraft. It’s a stress test for Europe’s entire defense integration project. If Paris and Berlin can’t hold this together, the continent risks losing not just billions, but also the credibility of its claim to genuine strategic independence.
The cracks go back years. As early as 2021, French officials worried their leadership role would be diluted if Germany and Spain commanded most of the orders. That same year, a classified German defense ministry report bluntly warned that France’s “dominant position” risked turning FCAS into “a Rafale 2.0 financed by German and Spanish budgets.” Those words summed up a deeper mistrust that has only hardened with time.
The promise of FCAS was to showcase Europe’s ability to stand on its own in a dangerous world. Instead, it has become a mirror reflecting the continent’s divisions—and a warning of just how costly they could be.
What was meant to be a showcase of Europe’s strategic autonomy has devolved into a bare-knuckle fight for control. France, officially sharing the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) with Germany and Spain as an equal partner, is maneuvering for dominance. Berlin is growing increasingly resentful, seeing Paris’s ambitions as a bid to bend the entire venture to the interests of Dassault Aviation. And France has a powerful tool at its disposal: the fine print of the 2019 Aachen Treaty, which allows Paris to block arms exports if they threaten its national interests.
Germany, meanwhile, looks less and less like an independent player. Its tilt toward Washington—underscored by Berlin’s decision to buy American weapons for Ukraine—has only deepened French suspicion. The obvious question is: what’s to stop Germany from eventually throwing its weight behind Boeing’s sixth-generation fighter project? Could FCAS end up hostage to the shifting winds of American politics?
On paper, the program is breathtaking: more than €100 billion in investment, a multirole fighter at the center, surrounded by drones, cloud-based systems, and artificial intelligence to choreograph aerial combat. But the bigger the vision, the sharper the clash of interests. Dassault, Airbus Defence and Space, and Spain’s Indra are still technically in the same boat, but each is rowing toward its own priorities.
Europe has been here before. Joint defense dreams have often collapsed under the weight of national egos. Britain once sat at the FCAS table, too—before peeling off to launch the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with Italy and Japan, a project that experts now say is pulling ahead of FCAS. Which means the current squabble between Paris and Berlin isn’t just Brussels-style bureaucracy—it’s a barometer of how fragile Europe’s very notion of military autonomy really is.
The roots of today’s crisis stretch back to 2021, when the first public rifts opened. Paris feared that Germany and Spain combined could control two-thirds of the contracts, effectively sidelining France as project leader. A classified German defense ministry report that year was blunt: France’s “dominant position,” it warned, threatened to turn FCAS into “a Rafale-Plus funded by German and Spanish budgets” rather than a truly joint, next-gen system. The mistrust baked into those words has only deepened since.
Right now, FCAS is in the phase of locking down core technologies and preparing for a demonstrator. Roughly €3.2 billion has been earmarked for this stage, which is supposed to wrap by summer 2026. If the timeline holds, a working prototype should be ready by 2029. But even now the question hangs in the air: can the partners actually make it that far together?
In France, hints are growing louder that the country may go it alone if the three-way arrangement collapses. Lawmakers have started asking outright: “Can we do this on our own?” Dassault CEO Eric Trappier told parliament this spring that equal work-share rules are choking progress. FCAS, he argued, is built around tight integration of fighter and drones—something that requires centralized leadership. “If no one is clearly in charge, coordination is simply impossible,” he warned.
French defense minister Sébastien Lecornu was just as blunt in the National Assembly: “We need an honest conversation about leadership. Building a fighter with three countries is incredibly difficult.” In Berlin, those remarks landed like a power grab. Germany’s aerospace industry association, BDLI, accused France of dressing up naked ambition as cooperation.
The clash has spilled far beyond boardrooms and trade groups. FCAS is now a political symbol, debated at the highest levels of government. On July 24, at Villa Borsig on Lake Tegel, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron agreed to task their defense ministers with drafting a “realistic outlook” for the project by the end of August. The plan is slated for presentation at a joint Franco-German cabinet meeting in Toulon on August 28–29, with final decisions expected before year’s end.
German defense minister Boris Pistorius tried to calm the waters during a meeting with Lecornu in Osnabrück. “I am convinced that European defense can only be strengthened through close Franco-German cooperation,” he insisted. But in practice, Paris and Berlin are drifting ever further apart in their very definition of what a “joint project” actually means.
Whether France and Germany can ultimately hammer out a deal on FCAS remains an open question. And it’s not just about technical specs—it’s about fundamentally different political and economic strategies. The arrival of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has only underscored the split. For Emmanuel Macron, FCAS is a pillar of “strategic autonomy,” a symbol of Europe cutting the cord from Washington. For Berlin, the slogan of “gradual independence from the U.S.” is more diplomatic varnish than actual policy. In practice, Germany is drawing ever closer to America—from trade arrangements with the EU to buying U.S.-made weapons for Ukraine.
France hasn’t exactly cooled tempers either. Paris is insisting the new jet be built in a carrier-capable version for its own navy. For Germany, which doesn’t operate carriers, that’s a non-issue. Even more sensitive is the nuclear question: FCAS’s ability to carry France’s nuclear payload. It’s almost never discussed in public, but it looms as perhaps the single biggest obstacle to compromise.
It’s worth recalling how FCAS was born. The idea first took shape in Donald Trump’s early years, when European governments were desperate to shore up independence from Washington—not only in politics, but in defense technology and supply chains. But since then, the landscape has shifted. Germany’s defense industry is now more deeply embedded in the American ecosystem than ever before.
The F-35 purchase was a case in point. Berlin ordered the Lockheed Martin fighter but insisted on some local production. Rheinmetall, based in Düsseldorf, secured a major share of that work. Yet more than a third of Rheinmetall’s stock is in North American hands. The company is expanding its U.S. partnerships, further entrenching reliance on American capital and technology.
Airbus, the cornerstone of Germany’s role in FCAS, is on a similar track. Its partnerships with American giants—from Northrop Grumman to Kratos—run deep. Just this July, Airbus and Kratos launched a joint drone program. And in Arlington, Virginia, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense has been operating for nearly half a century, embedded in projects with the Pentagon, DARPA, NASA, and other agencies.
Dassault Aviation, by contrast, is far less entangled with the U.S. defense complex. Two-thirds owned by the Dassault family through Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault, the company’s dealings with Lockheed Martin are minor—flight simulators and training gear. Unlike Airbus, it has no U.S. subsidiaries and no stake in America’s defense architecture. That’s precisely why Paris insists on taking the lead: France sees FCAS as a last chance to keep control over critical technologies and prevent the program from being diluted into yet another extension of American interests.
Against this backdrop, even if Macron and Merz make good on their promise to present a “realistic outlook” for FCAS by the end of 2025, the core contradictions won’t go away. FCAS isn’t just an airplane—it’s a mirror reflecting the split between France and Germany’s strategic worldviews.
At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether to share key technologies or keep them under lock and key. France made its position clear early on: it will not hand over its crown jewels wholesale. That was already the spark of a bruising 2021 clash between Dassault and Airbus. Berlin demanded access to critical systems; Paris insisted some stay sealed in a “black box.” For France, this isn’t just policy—it’s history. Back in the 1980s, Dassault walked away from the Eurofighter project, choosing instead to build the Rafale on its own.
That tension was laid bare in recent comments by Jean-Brice Dumont, head of Airbus Defense and Space. Switching from one partner to another, he admitted, is fraught: today you’re guarding intellectual property, tomorrow you’re expected to hand it over in full. Airbus is used to a culture of shared technology. Dassault is not. This clash of philosophies—Airbus’s openness versus Dassault’s tight grip—is the central drama of FCAS.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that Dassault holds the stronger hand. The Rafale has become a global best-seller—from India and Indonesia to the UAE, Egypt, and Serbia—its export demand steady and robust. That success is more than a commercial coup; it’s a political tool in France’s arsenal. Against that backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that many in Paris are asking: why risk diluting control in a joint venture when Dassault could simply chart its own course and keep all the export spoils for itself?
The arrival of new players has only made things messier. In 2024, Belgium was granted observer status and access to FCAS program data. Officially, this was explained as a response to procurement hiccups with Lockheed Martin’s F-35. Unofficially, it was a gambit to keep Brussels tethered to Europe. Dassault bristled. CEO Eric Trappier went public, saying Belgium’s simultaneous buy-in to F-35 made its role in FCAS “a farce.” Belgian defense minister Theo Francken fired back, insisting that as a NATO and EU member, his country didn’t need lectures from “arrogant industrialists.”
That sharp exchange fuels an uncomfortable suspicion: is Dassault itself maneuvering to derail FCAS? From a purely economic standpoint, the logic is clear. The company is thriving without the program, and if it pivots to building its own sixth-generation jet, it would secure near-monopoly control of exports—without Brussels-style bureaucracy and endless negotiations tying its hands.
This makes the fight over data-sharing more than a technical squabble. It’s a litmus test: either Europe moves toward a shared defense identity built on mutual trust, or it backslides into national projects where each country prioritizes its own interests and profits. With its powerhouse export portfolio, Dassault could well be the catalyst for such a pivot.
In the end, money is the decisive factor. Even if France doesn’t bolt from the consortium, the financial burden will dictate the program’s trajectory. Technologically, Paris could pull it off alone. Economically, it’s a backbreaker. The official figure of roughly €100 billion through development is already seen less as a serious estimate and more as a political compromise.
Greenpeace puts the real price tag into sobering perspective. Counting the full life cycle, the bill won’t be in tens of billions but in trillions. Analysts warn that operational costs—usually understated in early projections—make up the lion’s share. By 2070, the total outlay could hit between €1.1 and €2 trillion. For defense contractors, that spells windfall profits. For European taxpayers, crushing debt.
Spain has already made a symbolic move: rejecting the F-35 and committing instead to either the Eurofighter or FCAS. That decision gave the project a political boost but did nothing to answer the toughest question: who will shoulder the bulk of the costs?
Berlin has tried to tie FCAS’s fate to another flagship joint venture with France: the MGCS tank program, in which Rheinmetall plays the lead role. German defense minister Boris Pistorius declared on July 24 that both FCAS and MGCS should symbolize Franco-German partnership rather than fall prey to “national egoism.” He stressed Berlin’s “full and unanimous support” for both initiatives.
But words are cheap. In practice, both FCAS and MGCS are wobbling on the brink. If France this time—unlike in the 1980s—chooses to stay in the joint program, the decisive factor will be Germany’s willingness to fund it without caveats. Berlin is poised to massively ramp up defense spending in the coming years. Whether it commits those resources will determine if FCAS becomes the emblem of European technological independence—or just another grand ambition that never made it off the drawing board.