Russia\u2019s full-scale war on Ukraine<\/a> and before Trump\u2019s return to the White House.<\/p>\n\u201cNowadays, the project might be designed differently to reflect the scenario,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it doesn\u2019t affect the broader trend in Europe towards reducing dependencies on US military systems and strengthening its own defence capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
France and Germany will continue with some components of FCAS, such as its \u201ccombat cloud\u201d feature, which will increase Europe\u2019s cyber command-and-control capabilities, said Spatafora.<\/p>\n
Airbus and a number of other German companies are also seeking to continue the programme in other areas, particularly software architecture and drone technology, Shea said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there may be benefits for European defence and its defence technology base even if a manned fighter aircraft is not built,\u201d said Shea.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, there are \u201cscores\u201d of other joint defence projects being launched in Europe at the moment, even if they are not quite as ambitious as FCAS, he added.<\/p>\n
Guntram Wolff, a senior fellow at the European think tank Bruegel, similarly urged against alarmism.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would not interpret this decision overly negatively,\u201d Wolff told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cFCAS was a very complicated project and its military relevance may well be overstated at a moment of increasing importance of cheap autonomous systems. In part, the decision also reflects a reassessment of whether the high cost was really warranted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Europe, meanwhile, has other strengths it can build on, the analysts said.<\/p>\n
The continent is strong in shipbuilding, submarines, short-range missiles and air defence \u2013 with systems like the German IRIS-T and the French-Italian SAMP\/T \u2013 and has demonstrated it can build capable fighter jets, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Tornado and Gripen programmes have shown, Shea said.<\/p>\n
Lessons and challenges<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s main problem is underinvestment and the difficulty it has in scaling up to the level of mass production that modern warfare demands, said Shea.<\/p>\n
This issue was brought into sharp focus this week when the UK\u2019s secretary of state for defence dramatically resigned from government over defence funding.<\/p>\n
He simply cannot keep the country safe on what he has been given to spend, he said. In his resignation letter to the prime minister, he wrote: \u201cYou have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, European nations are going to have to come together if they have any hope of matching US military might in the future, analysts say.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the challenge of integrating all systems and all domains into a single battlefield management space where the US is in advance of the Europeans,\u201d Shea said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrones, which Russia and Ukraine are producing in the millions, are a case in point. Even the US suffers from weapons shortages as we have seen in the Iran war,\u201d the former NATO official added.<\/p>\n
Spatafora echoed the idea that the Russia-Ukraine war has lessons to offer the rest of Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lesson of the war in Ukraine is that, in order to deter and defend itself properly, Europe needs cheap, mass-produced capabilities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
FCAS was about a very expensive capability, \u201cso it was not really the key need for Europe\u2019s deterrence today\u201d, the analyst said.<\/p>\n
The more pressing question that FCAS raises is how European nations will coordinate large projects which single countries cannot produce on their own and which could clash with the interests of numerous national industries. This is the conundrum which will likely shape the design of future EU instruments to support cooperative defence projects, said Spatafora.<\/p>\n
Another challenge facing the continent is that major platforms like aircraft, ships or land warfare vehicles can take decades to develop, and contracts signed today will yield equipment that will not be on the battlefield before 2040, Shea said.<\/p>\n
Europe will need to upgrade its current capabilities \u2013 recent upgrades to the Eurofighter jet and the Leopard tank are examples he cited \u2013 and look for gap-fillers elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Spatafora argues that the FCAS collapse should not push European countries back towards reliance on American systems \u2013 or at least not more than they already have.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s approach and the depletion of stock after the Iran war have significantly reduced the reliability of US supplies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The reliability of US guarantees, he added, depends on other assets \u2013 long-range missiles, forward-deployed troops, command-and-control infrastructure \u2013 \u201crather than on a next-generation fighter jet\u201d, the analyst added.<\/p>\n
\u2018Military requirements\u2019 over \u2018political ambition\u2019<\/p>\n
The FCAS failure is certainly good news for Russia, Shea said, \u201cand also for the US, which will hope to sell Europe even more F-35s and maintain Europe\u2019s traditional dependency on US military equipment\u201d.<\/p>\n
A rebound from the collapsed project, therefore, he argued, is necessary. But that is already in the works, analysts say, as Europe is already turning away from US dependability.<\/p>\n
They point to the high likelihood of renewed interest in the UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) for a sixth-generation stealth fighter jet, in European Space Agency military space capabilities, and in EU defence financing mechanisms like the Security Action for Europe (SAFE).<\/p>\n
Joint ventures with Ukraine, which, under fire from Russia for four years, has mastered mass production of drone technology and AI, should also help keep Europe up to speed in key areas, Shea added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US has proven to be unreliable, or simply unable to remain committed to Europe, and the defence budgets are growing,\u201d Spatfora said.<\/p>\n
Washington will continue to remain relevant for certain capabilities \u2013 nuclear deterrence above all \u2013 but over time, European countries will seek to develop more and more on their own.<\/p>\n
The ultimate lesson of FCAS, however, Shea argued, is that defence integration \u201chas to be driven by military requirements rather than political ambition\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cooperation between France and Germany has always been difficult, he said \u2013 they have large defence companies \u201cthat do not want to play second fiddle to the other\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
A more promising model, he said, is the joint UK-Norway agreement to produce a new destroyer-class warship, with BAE Systems as the main contractor and smaller Norwegian companies participating.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth countries operate in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea and share exactly the same concept of what the ship should be,\u201d explained Shea.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it is this model of bottom-up, natural cooperation rather than top-down political cooperation that Europe needs to pursue.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France and Germany have announced this week that they are ditching a landmark project to jointly develop a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[479,151,1979,60,5,619,478,156,481,7856],"class_list":["post-35269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-donald-trump","tag-europe","tag-features","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-spain","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}