François Picard is pleased to welcome Ulrike Franke, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. According to Franke, the project’s demise was “not a surprise to anybody.” While acknowledging that Dassault was often perceived as “quite difficult to deal with,” she argues that the deeper problem lay in a structural design flaw that brought together industrial rivals who “never really had the incentive to properly work together.”
This reveals a broader story about Europe‘s defence ambitions in an era transformed by drone warfare, the war in Ukraine, and growing concerns about strategic dependence on the United States. Franke describes FCAS as “a project of another era,” while cautioning against simplistic claims that traditional fighter aircraft have become obsolete. Instead, she advocates a more adaptive approach, noting that future combat systems may need to be “optionally crewed” and integrated into a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Despite describing the FCAS failure as “bad news for European defence and Franco-German cooperation,” Franke ultimately adopts a pragmatic outlook. After years of industrial disputes and political friction, she suggests that ending the troubled programme may actually create space for more productive cooperation: “maybe it is even better for Franco-German cooperation that they’ve now finished this and that they can now move on.”
She offers a compelling window into the tensions shaping European defence today: sovereignty versus dependence, cooperation versus competition, and long-term strategic ambition versus the urgent demands of a changing security environment.
The collapse of the fighter jet pillar of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) marks one of the most significant setbacks in recent European defence cooperation. Conceived as a flagship project intended to deepen Franco-German strategic integration and strengthen European technological sovereignty, FCAS was meant to deliver a next-generation combat aircraft capable of operating in an increasingly contested security environment.
This story originally appeared on France24
