France and Germany Scrap Their Joint Fighter Jet, Europe's Costliest Defense Project

Germany and France have abandoned the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a program to build a next-generation fighter jet that was intended to be Europe's largest joint defense project, Euronews reported. The decision, made on June 8, ended an effort begun in 2017, after the companies involved failed to resolve years of disagreement over how to divide the work and what the aircraft should do.

The estimated cost had grown to more than $110 billion, a very large sum for a European defense initiative. The breakdown was caused by disputes over control and requirements. France's Dassault Aviation and Airbus, representing German and Spanish interests, could not agree on which company would lead, and the two governments needed different aircraft. France required a fighter able to carry nuclear weapons and operate from an aircraft carrier, capabilities Germany does not need, and France rejected a German proposal to develop two separate aircraft within a single program.

The collapse comes at a difficult moment. Europe is being pressed to provide for its own defense as the United States reduces its military presence on the continent, and the failure of its most prominent cooperative program shows how hard that will be in practice. National rivalries and differing strategic needs, the same factors that ended FCAS, affect nearly every shared European procurement.

Not everything stops. The networked Combat Cloud component of the project will continue, and both countries will now consider national or alternative routes to a future fighter. The broader lesson concerns the gap between Europe's stated ambition for strategic independence and its ability to achieve it.