SCAF, a symptom of a deeper malaise

The SCAF programme (Future Combat Air System), launched by France and Germany in 2017 before being joined by Spain, was intended to embody a new era for the European defence industry. An “Airbus of air combat”, capable of competing with the United States and guaranteeing Europe, particularly France and Germany, strategic sovereignty.

Eight years later, delays, tensions and internal paralysis have transformed this ambition into a textbook case of the difficulties faced by the continent in building a common industrial base.

The SCAF is not merely a Franco-German quarrel between Dassault and Airbus. It reveals the limits of national industrial methods, divergences between European states, the difficulty of articulating sovereignty and cooperation, as well as the absence of a supranational political architecture capable of arbitrating strategic choices.

It brings to light a paradox that could prove lethal for European states: at the very moment when external threats are increasing — Putin’s Russia and American uncertainty with a potentially hostile Trump — Europe remains incapable of producing an integrated defence.

This article explores the causes of this difficulty: the clash of industrial cultures, incompatible management methods, jealously guarded sovereignties, deep differences in administrative and political traditions, and the absence of a supranational authority capable of setting a strategic direction. The SCAF is merely the revealer of a broader question: can a European defence industry be built without simultaneously building a political Europe?

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The industrial causes of the deadlock: cultures, methods and sovereignties

Industrial actors with irreconcilable cultures?

At the heart of the conflict lies the rivalry between Dassault Aviation and Airbus Defence & Space. The two groups represent two diametrically opposed industrial cultures.

Dassault: an engineering-led company, a culture of secrecy, vertical integration, fast development cycles, strong hierarchy, tightly concentrated technical leadership. The company claims an “extended competence”, inherited from decades of complete programmes (Mirage, Rafale), and considers it natural to lead the architecture of the future aircraft.

Airbus: a multinational giant, matrix structure, heavy governance, a culture of compromise, more burdensome normative processes. Airbus considers its claim to share or lead certain pillars of the programme legitimate, in the name of its size, its economic weight and the German desire to balance roles according to financial contribution.

Compatibility between these two worlds remains limited. Dassault sees Airbus as an industrial bureaucrat incapable of producing a combat aircraft with the required mastery; Airbus sees Dassault as a “national industrial actor” seeking to impose its will on a programme financed by three states.

This opposition is more cultural than technical — and it weighs heavily.

Opposing methods for managing major programmes

France has a long tradition of centralised state programmes (Rafale, Leclerc, SSBNs), managed by a DGA capable of arbitrating and deciding rapidly. Germany, by contrast, prioritises industrial balance, federal representation and the protection of regional employment.

National sovereignty, the ultimate taboo of defence

A combat aircraft is not an industrial product like any other. It is an instrument of sovereignty, which no state readily relinquishes.

Beyond methods, defence touches the very heart of sovereignty. States refuse to share critical technologies, source codes, export rules or sovereignty of use. The result is a triangle of structural tensions:

• Dassault defends its technical competence and autonomy

• Airbus defends the logic of equitable European sharing

• States defend their national sovereignty

The example of space: ESA and the Commission as possible but insufficient models

The SCAF is not the first domain in which Europeans hesitate between cooperation and sovereignty. The space sector offers an illuminating contrast.

ESA: the principle of “industrial return”

Since its creation, the European Space Agency has applied a simple mechanism: each country recovers in industry what it has paid into the budget, proportionally to its contribution. The advantages are political acceptability, the maintenance of national ecosystems and the preservation of national competences. But the disadvantages are fragmentation, duplication and complex governance.

Nevertheless, ESA functions. Ariane exists, Copernicus exists, scientific missions are thriving.

The European Commission: calls for tenders open to competition

For Galileo, IRIS and other programmes, the Commission does not apply guaranteed industrial return. It favours open competition, which allows budgetary efficiency, a more integrated industrial logic and the leadership of pan-European companies.

But this absence of guarantees frightens states, which fear seeing their industries marginalised.

The dilemma: European efficiency or national balance?

These two models — the ESA compromise and the Commission’s competitive integration — are the only operational structures that exist at European level. In the absence of a supreme political authority, Europe constantly oscillates between these two logics, without ever managing to transcend them.

The SCAF inherits exactly this ambivalence: it seeks the technical efficiency of clear leadership, but must accommodate a system in which each state demands an equivalent share of the programme, commensurate with its financial contribution.

Dassault between technical legitimacy and financial limits

Dassault invokes its “extended competence” to demand leadership of the SCAF programme. This argument is indisputable from a technical point of view: Dassault is probably the only European manufacturer mastering the entire chain of a modern combat aircraft, from design to the integration of critical software.

By pushing the French state to finance a sixth-generation aircraft alone in the event of SCAF failure, Dassault is pursuing a well-understood strategy: to obtain a colossal budget, comparable to “sanctuarised” programmes such as nuclear deterrence, to eliminate European competitors in design, and to guarantee its dominant position for forty years.

But this technical legitimacy collides with an implacable constraint: France can no longer, on its own, finance the €80 to €100 billion required for a sixth-generation system (which includes the aircraft, but also the network and the “effectors”: cruise missiles, combat drones and bomber drones). Dassault’s hope that the state would finance a “Rafale NG” in the event of SCAF failure reveals a temptation to return to a sanctuarised national model, comparable to military nuclear budgets, but incompatible with current strategic realities.

Such a strategy would once again isolate Paris within Europe, weaken European industrial construction, and allow Germany to turn towards the GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme) led by the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan, creating additional fragmentation between France and the rest of the continent, to the detriment of the near future.

Faced with Putin’s Russia and the loss of the powerful historic American ally, no European country can claim to cope alone. The issue therefore goes beyond industry: it touches on the strategic survival of Europe.

The French precedent: national restructurings as an unfinished European model

Before asking other states to merge their industries, it is worth recalling that France itself had to undergo profound restructurings from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Major French mergers

• 1970: Creation of Aérospatiale – merger of Nord Aviation, Sud Aviation and SEREB.

• 1970–1980: rise of Snecma in propulsion.

• 1990: Birth of Airbus as an integrated company, following the abandonment of intergovernmental structures.2005: Merger of Snecma and Sagem – Safran.

• 2000–2014: Transformation of EADS into Airbus Group, progressive integration of national divisions.

Each time, France had to do what Europe has not yet managed to do: merge regional entities, harmonise methods, simplify governance and accept the loss of a share of local sovereignty.

Have we reached the territorial limits of states?

The answer seems obvious: yes. Sixth-generation programmes, next-generation military satellites, European anti-missile systems or sovereign constellations now exceed the financial and industrial capacities of a single state, of two or three states, or of a consortium of industrial actors jealous of their prerogatives.

What was done at regional level in France in the 1970s–1990s must now be done at European level. Without this, Europe will be condemned to buy American.

The central problem: the absence of a supranational political Europe

A defence industry requires clear political command

All the difficulties described above converge on a single point: the absence of a political authority capable of acting as a “European Pentagon”. The United States, facing Lockheed, Boeing or Northrop, possesses a single political, financial and strategic command. Europe, facing Airbus, Dassault or Leonardo, has only national sovereignties jealous of one another, incapable of deciding against their national champions.

As long as there is no genuine European executive power to define needs, decide priorities, allocate budgets and arbitrate between industrial actors, no real European defence industry can emerge.

The forgotten ideal: the “United States of Europe”

The founding fathers (Schuman, Spinelli, Monnet) understood that a common defence implied a common political power. The European Defence Community (EDC), rejected in 1954, sealed the fate of a fragmented Europe in military matters.

Even today, without a supranational power comparable to the US Department of Defense, the European defence industry will remain an archipelago of national rivalries.

Europe: the only possible way forward

In the absence of a supranational political authority, Europe can only function through intergovernmental cooperation logics of the Airbus, ESA or balanced consortium type. And it is precisely here that the structural limit of European construction in the defence industry lies.

Without political Europe, no “French-style” programme

In the absence of a genuine supranational political authority in Europe, capable of defining a clear strategic will before allocating the corresponding budgets, it is indeed impossible for member states to jointly conduct a defence programme according to the “French-style” model.

Such a model presupposes a unified decision-making structure, centralised technical leadership, a designated prime contractor, as well as a state capable of arbitrating rapidly between actors and imposing choices. This is what France traditionally does through the DGA: it defines requirements, sets priorities, selects the industrial architect and guarantees coherent financing over several decades.

This model exists nowhere else in Europe. It presupposes a strong, homogeneous and sovereign state. The European Union does not possess this type of authority — legal, budgetary or political. None of this exists today at European level, whether as an addition of twenty-seven sovereignties or even of only three sovereignties within the SCAF programme, each jealous of its sovereign prerogatives.

In today’s Europe, no programme can reproduce the French model.

The only possible model becomes a “European-style” model: Airbus / ESA

In this context, Europe can only function through intergovernmental cooperation logics, that is, by adopting models comparable to Airbus or ESA. These are the only two institutional architectures Europeans have been able to put in place to overcome the absence of a unified political power. The “Airbus model” is that of progressive industrial integration: national companies eventually merge or integrate within a single structure endowed with shared governance. This method made it possible to build the world’s most efficient commercial aircraft manufacturer, precisely because states gradually agreed to relinquish part of their industrial sovereignty.

Unfortunately, this model shows its limits as soon as it is applied to military programmes. States refuse to merge the sensitive elements of their sovereignty. Where civil aviation could be rationalised on industrial bases, defence remains intrinsically linked to sovereign power, which prevents the creation of a true “Airbus of armaments”.

The “ESA model” therefore remains, based on the principle of guaranteed geographic return. In this system, each state recovers, in the form of industrial contracts, a proportion of value equivalent to its financial contribution. This method makes it possible to reconcile cooperation and the preservation of national ecosystems, but it mechanically produces heavier, more fragmented and slower programmes. ESA works because it operates in a field where military sovereignty is less direct; but applying this model to armaments programmes means accepting even more compromises, where technical robustness would instead require firm choices.

In reality, European defence programmes such as the SCAF find themselves trapped in a structural in-between: they can neither adopt the French method, for lack of a European state endowed with strong executive power, nor rely entirely on industrial integration in the Airbus manner, because states refuse to abandon their military sovereignty. They therefore inevitably fall back into the ESA pattern, made up of laborious compromises, permanent negotiations and institutional heaviness.

A deeper divide: European cultural models in the face of change

State structure versus decentralisation and a culture of compromise

At this stage of the analysis, it is essential to introduce an element that is rarely addressed but decisive: the deep cultural difference that opposes, on the one hand, the French model, and on the other hand, Nordic and Germanic models.

France embodies a unique state model in Europe: centralised, vertical, unitary, heir to the administrative monarchy and consolidated by all successive regimes that saw in it their survival, including and especially the Republic. It is a state that conceives change as a rupture, and often as a threat. This model values continuity, stability and protection. Historically, it is linked to an administrative and intellectual culture shaped by centuries of national unification, and to the heritage of Catholicism valuing unity and hierarchy.

By contrast, Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany or Switzerland rely on more decentralised political structures, a more pragmatic relationship to rules, a culture of compromise, tolerance for institutional diversity and greater trust in local levels. These countries are generally more open to change, faster to adapt, and more inclined to integrate innovation into their administrative processes.

France at the end of a cycle

At a time when artificial intelligence, digitisation and technological disruptions are accelerating, these more flexible political cultures appear better equipped to navigate a rapidly changing world. Is France outdated or condemned? It is probably reaching the end of a historical cycle: its centralised model, which was a powerful asset in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is becoming less suited to current challenges.

The issue is therefore not the “end of France”, but the end of the “French model” as a European reference. Transformation can occur in two ways: either through internal adaptation and reinvention of the central state, or through a partial transfer of sovereignty to Europe, which appears inevitable.

The painful question of the future of the French model is inseparable from the question of the future of European construction.

Conclusion: without political Europe, European industry will remain structurally unfinished

The SCAF fails because a fundamental element is missing: a political Europe capable of deciding, arbitrating and leading.

As long as the Union remains a juxtaposition of states with different political cultures, incompatible industrial methods and jealously guarded sovereignties, it will be able to produce only programmes based on compromise, never on strategic coherence. This striking observation applies to France and Germany, which are unable to adapt to one another.

The future of European defence therefore depends on a clear choice: either finally crossing the political threshold envisioned by the founding fathers, or accepting to remain a fragmented industrial power.

France, which is reaching the end of a historical cycle of centralisation and rejection of compromise, will inevitably have to choose its path decisively: to refound its model and its society, while actively contributing to the emergence of a political Europe which alone will make it possible to carry out the industrial programmes of the future.