The grand European push for strategic autonomy is hitting the hard limits of industrial rivalry. At the Berlin air show this month, MBDA chief Éric Béranger made an impassioned case that the continent can only be sovereign if it acts together, yet the wreckage of the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS combat jet programme—killed by a dispute between Dassault and Airbus—hung over the exhibition halls. That same corporate feud is now paralysing the Eurodrone, a medium-altitude unmanned system meant to break Europe’s dependence on American MQ-9 Reapers. First flight has already slipped from 2025 to 2027, and analysts in Washington openly predict the entire project will fail, leaving European militaries reliant on US or Israeli imports for the foreseeable future.

The discord is not confined to the air. At the Eurosatory land warfare fair near Paris, German industry presented the MBT Vision 2032, a concept for a Leopard 2 successor, while French firms pursue a separate modernisation trajectory for the Leclerc. The two sides diverge on fundamental design philosophies, a doctrinal split that mirrors the one that doomed the joint fighter. For defence planners in London and Brussels, the spectacle of Europe’s two largest military powers pulling in opposite directions on tanks, drones and combat aircraft raises uncomfortable questions about the continent’s ability to field a coherent next-generation force without defaulting to American suppliers.

Where cooperation does show promise, timelines betray the gap between rhetoric and reality. With Patriot systems in critically short supply, roughly fifteen countries—from Kuwait and Hungary to Switzerland and Estonia—are studying the SAMP/T NG, a European air-defence alternative built by the Eurosam consortium. Yet even this bright spot is dimmed by industrial constraints. Russian defence observers note the system cannot be rapidly scaled, and European industry concedes that first deliveries are unlikely before 2029. The episode encapsulates a broader paradox: Europe can design credible alternatives to American hardware, but its fragmented production base cannot deliver them at the speed modern security crises demand.

The war in Ukraine is forcing more immediate, and more ironic, adaptations. The French Army has begun fitting its upgraded Leclerc XLR tanks with slat-armour cages above the turret—a concept Russian forces pioneered in 2022 to defeat drone-dropped munitions. Once mocked on social media as improvised “cope cages,” the structures have proven effective, and KNDS France is now serial-producing them under the Scorpion modernisation programme. That a leading European military is copying a Russian battlefield innovation, even as it seeks to reduce dependencies elsewhere, underscores how the drone age is upending established hierarchies of military technology.

Taken together, these threads reveal a continent caught between sovereignty dreams and centrifugal industrial politics. The Franco-German axis, long the engine of European defence integration, is misfiring. Without a functioning partnership, flagship programmes stall and the temptation to buy off-the-shelf from Washington or Jerusalem grows. Yet the drive for autonomy persists, sharpened by the realisation that over-reliance on any single outside power carries strategic risk. The question now is whether political leaders can impose the shared requirements and industrial consolidation that their own defence chiefs quietly admit are essential—or whether the logic of national champions will leave Europe more dependent than ever.