Dr Robert Brüll is the co-founder and CEO of FibreCoat, an advanced materials company developing coated fibres for aerospace, defence and industrial applications. He holds a PhD in materials science from RWTH Aachen University, where his research into scalable fibre-coating technologies led to the creation of FibreCoat in 2020.
The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the French President, Emmanuel Macron, have come to accept that the joint European defence programme Future Combat Air System (FCAS) cannot go on. The proximate cause was a row between Dassault Aed defence arm of the aerospace giant Airbus
But the break was a long time coming. Disputes over such fundamental questions as who would control the design, workshare and intellectual property of the future fighter aircraft at the heart of the programme were never resolved.
Is this a loss for Europe? Not necessarily. War has changed and continues to change rapidly. Alongside crewed combat aircraft, Europe needs drones, autonomous systems, advanced materials, electronic warfare, distributed sensors, and AI-enabled decision-making.
There’s also the matter as to whether FCAS, as originally conceived, really would have given Europe what it needs militarily in the 2040s and beyond. The rate of change in war is so fast that even a ‘next-generation’ fighter jet risks becoming obsolete within a few years.
FCAS exposed Europe’s defence problem
This is yet another example of how the institutional structure of the European defence ecosystem undermines its own ability to defend itself. At present, defence agencies favour what they know, which in practice means the big primes.
These primes still have a role to play, but they are often poorly placed to innovate quickly, build quickly, deploy quickly, and iterate quickly, which is the name of the game in modern war. Where Ukraine is churning out ever-more sophisticated drones with 3D printers, we in Western Europe are still procuring exquisite systems that take years to build at exorbitant cost.
Moreover, the countries of Europe are still in the habit of backing their own domestic industries and seeking to develop technology at home. So rather than agree on common standards, share the costs of development, scale technology, and produce one pan-European interoperable system, countries build their own.
It’s hard to overstate how dysfunctional this arrangement is – and how counterproductive it is to our goal, as a continent, of achieving strategic autonomy and deterring our enemies from attacking us. It’s in part the product of risk-aversion on the part of certain policymakers, and in part the consequence of having not needed to think hard or seriously about defence for decades.
Given the wealth of European talent and strength of our economies, as well as the increasing willingness of our governments to free up money to invest in defence, this is a completely unnecessary state of affairs. Yet top-to-bottom reform has not been forthcoming.
The FCAS fiasco creates opportunities if Europe is willing to learn from the experience. It could lead to the development of a better fighter aircraft, one that isn’t designed by committee as a compromise first and a weapon second. This would be a jet built according to clear requirements, a common architecture, with rapid software upgrades and the ability to work with drones, sensors, electronic warfare systems, and other aircraft from the start. Helsing’s CA-1might be an alternative.
Build the network, not just the fighter
An alternative is to see the fighter as part of a wider combat system. Air superiority will still matter, of course, as will range, payload, resilience, and the ability to keep working in contested airspace. But it will be part of a command platform, a node in a network, and Europe could invest in the network rather than the node.
In practical terms, it could divert money towards drones, software, electronic warfare, sensors, secure communications, and autonomous tech. Defence agencies will need to reach out to the smaller companies that can develop this specialist technology quickly, and they will need to focus on what works, not what pleases the right stakeholders. Politicians maintain the power to do the right thing; they now have the opportunity to do so.
Another way to put this is: Europe has to start from the battlefield and the needs of the battlefield and work backwards in bottom-up fashion. At the moment, it is much too top-down, much too respectful of the policymakers, traditions and stakeholders who have a vested political or financial interest in keeping things the way they are.
It goes without saying that in some parts of the world, namely Ukraine, this is not a choice. Every system is peer-reviewed by the harsh reality of war. Europe must have the humility to consider what commanders need, what can be built quickly, what can be upgraded continuously, and what can be produced in sufficient numbers. Indeed, we are focusing much too much on what we need to build rather than how to build it, and adapt it, quickly.
The collapse of FCAS is a debacle. But it’s also data. What it shows is not that Europe lacks engineering skill, a that turns these assets, which are beyond doubt, into high-tech military power quickly
Read more expert opinions on aerospace matters in our dedicated section hereRead more expert opinions on aerospace matters in our dedicated section here
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DefenceDefence & SecurityAirbusDassaultFCASFranceGermany
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