FCAS future fighter program hits renewed France-Germany-Spain tensions

Europe’s flagship future-fighter project is wobbling again, because three governments are trying to design one aircraft while also using it as a jobs program.

France24 reports renewed tensions in the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) effort led by France, Germany and Spain. The program is meant to deliver a next-generation combat aircraft and a broader “system of systems” architecture, pairing a crewed fighter with networked sensors and so-called remote carriers (uncrewed adjuncts). It is also meant to prove that Europe can build high-end airpower without buying American.

The problem is that FCAS is not primarily an engineering project; it is an industrial-political bargain. Each partner wants “workshare” that looks good domestically, IP arrangements that preserve national champions, and governance structures that prevent any one company from dominating. France24 describes the latest disputes as threatening progress — a cycle of announcements, deadlines, and then another round of bargaining.

State-coordinated megaprojects often run into the same failure mode: incentives are optimized for consensus, not delivery. When procurement is centralized and politically allocated, cost overruns are not a bug but a feature — they are how every stakeholder gets paid. “Strategic autonomy” becomes a slogan for locking in a single vendor constellation, which then faces weak competitive pressure to hit milestones.

Meanwhile, the security rationale that is supposed to justify the program — Europe’s deteriorating threat environment — cuts the other way. If timelines slip and unit costs rise, air forces fill the gap by extending legacy fleets or buying off-the-shelf alternatives. That produces the opposite of autonomy: dependence on emergency purchases and foreign supply chains, just later and at higher cost.

Europe does not lack aerospace talent; it lacks the willingness to let failure happen quickly and visibly. A genuinely resilient European defense-industrial base would look less like one grand cathedral project and more like parallel, competing supply chains with multiple primes and rapid iteration — the kind of redundancy markets create when governments stop trying to pre-allocate winners.

FCAS, as currently structured, is designed to avoid exactly that. It is a political compromise machine that occasionally produces PowerPoint renderings, and sometimes even hardware, after the ministers finish dividing the spoils.

France24’s reporting suggests the latest round of tensions is not an aberration but the program’s operating system. If Europe wants a fighter, it can build one. If it wants a symbol, FCAS is already flying — on paper.