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Europe’s 6th Generation Fighter Breakup – The End of FCAS & What Next for the 6th Gen Race?
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Channel: Perun
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOmqyofNmrA
Date: June 14, 2026
Via: free (youtube-transcript)
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SUMMARY
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After nearly a decade of development, Europe’s only fully-European sixth-generation fighter program—FCAS/SCAF, uniting France, Germany, and Spain—has officially collapsed. The program was meant to be a triumph of European cooperation and strategic autonomy, combining resources to develop a next-generation fighter, associated combat drones, and a unified combat cloud. Despite significant investment and repeated political commitments, fundamental disagreements over aircraft requirements and bitter industrial disputes ultimately proved insurmountable.
As Germany’s Chancellor Scholz openly said publicly, “The French need in the next generation of fighter jets an aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons and operating from an aircraft carrier. That is not what we currently need in the German military.”
France required a true sixth-generation successor to the Rafale—a carrier-capable, nuclear-strike aircraft that could maintain French strategic autonomy and serve export markets. Germany needed a continental air-superiority fighter to operate alongside F-35s and replace the Eurofighter, with no carrier or nuclear requirements. These diverging specifications were known from the start but never resolved. Simultaneously, industrial partners Dassault and Airbus fought over workshare, technology transfer, and program control, with each arguably preferring a national program over genuine multinational cooperation despite the cost implications.
The Soul’s CEO, Trapier, said that they had the knowhow and capability to develop a new jet fighter alone. Essentially, a statement that boiled down to pointing at Airbus and saying, “We don’t really need you, so get on board.” For their part, at least one Airbus leader reportedly publicly came out and basically implied the same in the other direction.
France has announced it will continue developing a sixth-generation fighter independently, though questions remain about engine development (previously a multinational effort) and program funding amid fiscal constraints. Germany faces starker choices: buy more American F-35s (contradicting European autonomy goals), lead a new German-centric program with partners like Sweden and Spain, or join the UK-Japan-Italy Tempest program. Tempest offers the closest match to German requirements—a heavy air-superiority fighter operating alongside F-35s—and a more advanced timeline targeting 2035 service entry. For the UK, absorbing Germany and Spain could provide crucial funding, scale, and export opportunities, potentially making Tempest the first non-American, non-Chinese sixth-generation fighter on the international market. However, Tempest faces its own existential threat from UK Treasury budget pressures, with reported proposals to delay funding that could damage the industrial base, alienate partners, and squander a generational opportunity for British defense industry leadership.
TRANSCRIPT
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OPENING
In the world of military programs, designing and building a next generation fighter, or at least one that’s any good, is up there with some of the most difficult things a country can choose to do. And as the push towards sixth generation fighters has gathered steam over the last couple of years, we’ve repeatedly seen proof that it’s much easier to start a program than it is to see it through to conclusion. Russia’s next generation ambitions have suffered from the immense resource demands of the war in Ukraine, not to mention ongoing kinetic sanctions. While even in the much better funded United States military, there have been repeated debates about resourcing both an air force and navy fighter at the same time. Back in 2017, wanting a next generation
fighter of their own, but daunted by the resources involved, France and Germany decided to team up. In 2019, Spain would join the team as well. This was meant to be a triumph of European cooperation, pulled resources, and greater strategic autonomy. It was meant to avoid the pitfalls that had toppled many a multinational program before it. immense time and resources would be invested trying to build towards something acceptable to all parties only for them to later decide to break up and do their own thing anyway. For years, we were told Paris, Madrid, and Berlin were totally committed to the program. But questions over everything from
complicated technical exchange and industrial arrangements to simpler issues like what is the plane meant to do were very clearly in the open. some of them previously discussed on this channel, leading to the recent announcement that after nearly a decade of effort, the only solely European sixth generation fighter program was going to break up and the involved parties potentially split off and do their own thing. And so today, we’re going to do an update on the sixth generation fighter race, the dramatic collapse of the FrancoGerman Spanish effort, and what this potentially means for the other partly European sixth gen, the Tempest, as it continues its battles
with its most redoubtable foe, the British Treasury. To do that, we’ll start with some background on the sixth generation race more broadly and also trace the evolution of the FrancoGerman Spanish program from the initial idealism of 2017 through some of the debates and conflicts that defined it until ultimately the political leadership had to accept the inevitable and take the program out behind the barn to join many a multinational program before it. Then we’ll turn our eyes to what the options are for what comes next. Firstly for France and then for Germany and Spain. That’ll include not just discussion of what these countries
SIXTH GEN REQUIREMENTS
might do when it comes to future fighter development, but also the opportunities this might represent for the other partly European sixg program. Before we can understand why one or more of these programs might ultimately unravel, it’s helpful to understand what they were trying to do. Fighter generations are not hard universal categories. And for many reasons, including just marketing, countries and companies often have reasons to play fast and loose with their descriptions. Some countries with what are generally regarded as fourth generation fighters, for example, might describe them as incorporating fifth or sixth generation features. While to help reflect all the upgrades and new
features that have been integrated over time, we’ve seen new designations appear in marketing brochures and online materials over time, giving us fourth generation plus, fourth generation plus, and sometimes even claimed fourth generation plus plus fighters. That said, across the board, there are some generally acknowledged features of what a sixth generation fighter program should do. Whether you’re talking about thinking in the United States, China, or Europe, it’s generally accepted a sixth generation fighter has to be stealthy and survival, represent a massive leap in sensors, computing power, electrical
generation, and cooling capacity compared to previous designs, offer impressive performance compared to previous generations, and also be designed to operate as part of a system of systems. practically all of the major programs we’re aware of and some extra ones like the Russian envisionage sixth generation fighters flying alongside air combat drones that puts the man fighter in the role not just to being an individual combatant but also a survivable sensor and control node basically a high performance command center that can keep a couple of humans alive so they can orchestrate a system of drones around them. That’s part of
the way you’re meant to be able to get mass and magazine depth in your fighter fleet despite these new aircraft likely being incredibly expensive and potentially cost prohibitive to produce in the kind of quantities that we saw with some fourth generation aircraft in the past. It’s also part of the reason these programs in the development phase are so difficult and so horrendously expensive. You don’t just have to develop a new fighter aircraft and that would be hard enough for many countries on its own. You also need to develop the relevant subsystems. You need to develop the drones and you need to come up with the networking architecture that’s going to enable them to operate as a team. An important piece of context here is that
at the phase that many countries were embarking on these programs, there was in some defense circles a bit of a debate. Did you actually need a next generation man fighter? Or were the drones ready to take on more of that role? I’d argue that at this point most major military powers have clearly decided that you do. A lot of the major airfleets are still relying on cold war era designs that are rapidly aging out. And since the drones aren’t ready yet, unless you’re willing to just not have a top tier air force for a couple of decades, you’re probably going to need at least one more fighter generation. Whether you need another one beyond that, we’ll see. But as we begin to move
into what might be Air Combat’s teaming era, it’s pretty clear that most expect a crude platform to be part of the team for some time yet. And if you want that crude component to be effective and survival, that probably means a sixth generation fighter. There is a massive difference though between thinking you need something and being able to actually design and produce it. On the difficulty spectrum of defense industrial efforts, this is close to as hard as it gets. Very few nations out there have actually demonstrated the ability to design and build fifth generation designs. And these are likely to be more complex again. And in general, if you’re trying to evaluate
GLOBAL PROGRAMS
whether a nation or group of nations can potentially pull something off in the defense industrial space, I’d argue there are at least three inputs you generally need. A sufficiently large pile of cash, the political will to shovel it into the fire, and the industrial and scientific capabilities necessary to make sure that what emerges from the furnace is the kind of product that’s going to be more than worth the expense. This is not the kind of project you can kit bash together in your garage. And some of the skills and experience needed is not the kind of stuff you’re going to be able to just throw up a seek.com ad for. Based on those three criteria, unless countries were willing to compromise, say use
imported components and knowhow or a licensed design, it’s been clear for years that there only a couple of major programs that stood a reasonable chance of success. Many of them were concentrated in the two major industrial powers that had already designed and produced entirely sovereign fifth generation designs, the United States and People’s Republic of China. The US has two major programs. The Air Force’s F-47 air superiority fighter and the Navy’s FAXX intended to replace the old FA18. And even in the context of a defense industrial base as large and developed as the United States, that’s
apparently proving to be a bit of an ask. F47 appears to be all ahead flank, but for the Navy’s fighter, things have been much more choppy. At times, the Navy itself has proposed delaying the program in order to push funding into other areas. And there have been concerns raised about capacity in the sector as a lot of talented people and resources are directed towards things like F-47. For the moment, one of the only things that appears to be keeping FAXX moving even at the speed that it is is Congress. When the administration moved to cut funding for FAXX down to about $70 million for the year, congressional appropriators moved in to
try and top that up slightly by roughly an extra 900 million. The US also has a relatively advanced drone wingman program to fly alongside the fifth and sixth generation fighters. This is the collaborative combat aircraft or CCA. And while we haven’t seen production design selected yet, the funding and priority very much appears to be there. We should also give the United States an honorable mention for being close to being the first country to actually field the next generation aircraft, although in the form of a bomber, not a fighter. The B2 Spirit’s replacement, the B-21 Radar, has been flying for some time, and there’s talk of it entering
service in a limited capacity as early as next year. The reason B21 might be relevant here is because even though it’s not a fighter, some technologies and lessons from the program are likely to be transferable. And if you finish the hard work of designing the aircraft and it transitions into production, that’s potentially a lot of skilled individuals who can transition onto other programs. The other multi-program actor if you like is clearly China. US head of air combat command has said it’s the US assessment that China is moving in much the same direction as the United States towards a system of systems with part of that system being at least one design
for a sixth generation fighter. As it is, we’ve seen plenty of futuristic airframes from the PRC, some of which we’ve seen in flight. And of course, China may actually be ahead in some respects when it comes to fielding stealthy combat drones. And while Beijing is still very much behind the Americans in the stealth bomber game, the expectation should probably be that with the H20 program, they’ll get there eventually. Beyond the two superpowers though, where are others in this next gen aviation race? Because while many have talked about it, most would struggle with those three criteria we discussed earlier. Sweden SA has a
history of fighter design, but it’s hard to imagine them finding the funding to carry a sixth generation program all of their own. India has talked about incorporating some sixth generation feeders in their domestic fifth generation fighter, the advanced medium combat aircraft in the future, but they’ve also publicly said that the Indian Air Force would be interested in joining another sixth generation fighter development program rather than going it entirely alone. Before the 2022 invasion, Russia had vast next generation aircraft ambitions, including both a flying wing strategic bomber and a sixth generation fighter, PAC DP. But those programs are now hilariously
EUROPEAN CONTEXT
delayed. And as much of the Russian defense sector is cannibalized by the requirements of the war in Ukraine, it seems doubtful that Russia has what it takes to really keep up with the major competitors going forward. That still leaves one power block, however, that potentially could. That’s Europe, or specifically Europe plus a couple of extra allies on the side. What you’re looking at here is a chart that very roughly measures two types of GDP, nominal and purchasing power parody. When it comes to a major defense program, both can matter. If you’re paying scientists and engineers, purchasing power par probably matters
more. But if you’re importing anything or using goods that you could otherwise export on the international market, nominal is probably the more accurate measure. As you can see, whether you make a PPP adjustment or not, Russia is really a bit of an also ran here compared to the three other columns. The United States, People’s Republic of China, and a group of states I’ve glued together here consisting of the European Union, United Kingdom, and Japan. In nominal terms, that bolt together economic collection is roughly equivalent to the United States and in purchasing power parody roughly equivalent to China. And the reason to glue that collection of states together
is because that’s where the other six generation programs mostly come from. The Europe plus others column gave us two main sixth generation programs. One coalition mostly consisting of the United Kingdom, Japan, and Italy is working on the Tempest as the man fighter component of their system of systems. On paper, that fighter has both a fairly aggressive timeline for testing and entry into service with the first flight scheduled for 2028 and service entry for 2035. And also on paper, a lot of industrial and technological bases covered. You have the likes of MBDA for weapons, the Italians for sensors,
Rolls-Royce for engines, and the Japanese capable of bringing a lot of material science components and other knowhow to the table. All those nations have experience operating a fifth generation fighter, the F-35, and are part of its broader supply chain. And between them they also have a lot of existing capability to produce advanced combat aircraft. The other program FCAS in English or SCAF in French originally combined Germany and France with Spain joining a couple of years later. Keep in mind here that when I refer to SCAF going forward I’m usually going to be referring just to one component of the system of systems which is the next generation fighter which gets us to what
SCAF VISION
SCAF was meant to be. The big thing to say up front is the program was born in a very different political and security context to today. German military spending was considerably lower and while Crimea had already happened, the threat of Russian military activity was viewed very differently than it was post 2022. That perhaps provides some useful context as to why the program was ultimately structured and carried through the way it was. There were very real military requirements here, but also political and industrial incentives. On paper, this was going to be a European program to develop exactly the kind of air combat system of systems
we’ve talked about with some of these other efforts. Unlike China, Russia, and the United States, there wasn’t meant to be a manned bomber as part of the next generation mix, which obviously saved some resources. But a lot of the other features were meant to be there. There was meant to be a unified combat cloud to enable the two air forces and all of these systems to share information and operate effectively together. And leveraging that cloud, a system of drones to work alongside the manned aircraft. When we first talked about the program several years ago, it did look like the French and Germans were taking a slightly different tack compared to the likes of say the Americans. Whereas something like America’s CCAs or the
Chinese sharps sword, the Russian Okotnik or the Australian Ghostbat are essentially closer to mini unmanned aircraft in terms of cost and size. The European effort was talking primarily about something they called remote carriers. These look like they were going to be much closer to pieces of ordinance than they were expensive recoverable unmanned aircraft. Basically, multi-purpose missilesiz objects that might be deployed by fighters or pushed out the back of a cargo aircraft carrying all kinds of potential payloads. whether that be sensors, jammers, or some kind of offensive munition. This might have left the European model less reusable and
sustainable than the American approach, but also meant you could afford a lot of remote carriers and be able to generate a lot of mass for particular engagements. Over time, though, the difference between the different programs appeared to reduce somewhat. The Europeans kept the remote carrier concept, but they also started talking about larger reusable systems in the CCA vein. This concept shown off by Airbus back in 2022, for example, was for a larger, modular, reusable drone capable of swapping in different sensors depending on the mission and also carrying different internal payloads. That included jamming pods, media
airto-air missiles, JAMs, spears, and also according to that slide, a pair of the smaller remote carriers, so you could put a drone in your drone and thus get a little bit closer to that whole Ukraine war drone matrioska experience. And then at the center of this air combat system was going to be a manned next generation fighter. For France, this would augment and eventually replace the SS Rafal. And for the Lufafa, this would presumably replace the Euro fighter operating in the future alongside that air force’s F-35s. In terms of the industrial knowhow behind the effort, there was arguably a lot
going for it. Some of the big names involved had a lot of pedigree behind them. the soul Airbus Indra. It would be hard to go wrong with missiles provided by the likes of MBDA and the next generation fighter engine was going to bring together some of the European companies other than Rolls-Royce that might have the chops and experience to actually pull that task off. France’s saffron had proven themselves on the power plant for the Rafal. And on the other side, Germany’s MTU just to name two. So on paper, you had a coalition that combined France’s recent experience with aircraft like the Rafal, Germany’s industrial heft and checkbook and a
FATAL TENSIONS
couple of key contributions from multinationals or other members of the coalition like Spain. And yet in the past when we’ve talked about sixth generation fighter programs outside of Russia, this has always been the one I described as being on the shakiest ground with the next obvious question being why? The truth is SCAF has been very publicly on life support for years. And while especially industrially this has been a bit of a tense divorce that will no doubt lead to some interesting discussion in the comments from half a world away there always seem to be two main landmines in the path between scaff and success and it managed to
sequentially step on both of them. The first is that despite all the money and time spent scoping sessions discussion published papers agreements press releases and development efforts there’s no real evidence that the parties involved were ever able to answer a fairly basic development question. What exactly was the next generation fighter meant to be? Because while everyone involved seems to agree that this was probably going to be a stealthy plane of some kind, presumably capable of carrying exploding things and making other planes go boom, beyond that, the basic requirement seemed to have clashed and the vision for what the plane was
meant to be got a bit murky with part of the issue coming back to the fact that the countries involved were trying to replace very different aircraft with very different doctrinal roles. For France, this needed to be a next generation Rafale, a multi-purpose nuclear capable carrier fighter capable of flying off France’s next generation flattop, deploying ASMPA and nextg nuclear weapons, carrying out air combat tasks, and also heavily involved in ground strike. Beside a couple of nuclear sharing B-61 gravity bombs, though, the Lufafa does not have nuclear weapons, and it sure as heck does not
have carriers. What they wanted then essentially was a continental air superiority fighter, something that could defend German and Allied airspace and potentially go head-to-head with the VKS alongside drone wingmen. There are a couple of pieces evidence suggests that this difference was not small and also very hard for the two countries to get around. For France, there’s every reason to believe that the requirements they were after would have been fundamental. There is no expectation you’ll be able to fly a fourth generation aircraft like Rafal forever and expect it to remain survivable no matter what upgrades you apply to it. And with limitations of
French budget and industry, it’s impossible to imagine them producing both a sixth generation air superiority fighter and also a sixth generation carrier and nuclear strike fighter. If they wanted to remain a carrier power and keep their nuclear doctrine as it was, Paris was going to need Scaff to be a true sixth gen Rafal. I’d argue it’s not simple stubbornness and it’s not the kind of thing you can expect negotiators to easily work their way around. It was part of the core strategic brief that France would always struggle to compromise on. Interviews with program officials do indicate the belief was the future fighter would be significantly
heavier than Rafal. There was also an understanding the future carrier operating these things would need to be larger than the existing deaul and we’ve seen that with France’s next generation aircraft carrier plans. But there were always going to be engineering red lines that will be very difficult for Paris to cross. But Germany was also publicly very clear that wasn’t the kind of plane they really needed and the engineering concessions involved in making that kind of aircraft would make it less useful for the Luftwaffer. As Germany’s Chancellor Mutz openly said publicly, quote, “The French need in the next generation of fighter jets an aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons and
operating from an aircraft carrier. That is not what we currently need in the German military.” End quote. Now given the countries apparently weren’t willing to entertain the funniest potential solution to this square peg round hole problem of just giving Germany aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons in order to align the requirements. This appears to have remained a point of contention and friction over the many years the program was live. And things actually reached a point back in February, the leadership of AirPass openly began talking about the possibility of a so-called two fighter solution where the nextG fighter part of Scaff wouldn’t produce one but two different designs to better align
with the French and German requirements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the stakeholds involved don’t appear to have been particularly keen to repeat the F-35ABC experience. And so the two plane solution doesn’t appear to have really gotten off the ground or succeeded in tamping down industrial tensions. While this explanation of diverging requirements is being brought up to help explain the demise of the project now though, there is one extra thing to say before we move on. If this was a significant problem in recent years, it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to any involved. It’s not like the French weren’t clear up front that they wanted the thing to be able to fly off a carrier and have a nuclear strike
roll. Nor was Germany exactly concealing the fact they didn’t intend to roll out any copies of the Ford class in the near future. We do have evidence that the likely dimensions of the aircraft and its necessary capabilities were being discussed. And you’ll find articles and interviews dating back all the way to 2019 confirming that the next generation fighter component of SCAFF would be a carrier capable aircraft. The parties in this program always understood the potential tension around the requirement just as they likely also understood that there were going to be some contests around industrial sharing. Speaking of industrial tensions, that was the other real landmine in the path of this
INDUSTRIAL BREAKDOWN
program. As is often the case with multinational defense programs, it’s possible for the governments involved to really want a program to succeed and for Treasury to back it because sharing costs make sense, and it does. Once you start involving companies in industrial planning, though, it can quickly become a bit of a trench fight. And in Scaff’s case, that appears to have happened. At a fundamental level, some of the problems here come down to the fact that often you’re talking about companies that might be competitors having to work together. And so they are often going to be looking at this as a zero- sum game, not just with regards to the program,
but their broader competition. And that can play out and poison negotiations in a number of respects. Firstly, workshare. In an ideal world, both sides are going to want the other side to be the one paying for the program, but their companies to be the ones actually building it. They want the jobs. They want the investment. They want the accumulated IP. They just don’t want the bill. And while everyone involved can couch this in different terms depending on what’s convenient to them. Whether that be fairness or capability, in the end, the problem is you’re usually looking at a zero sum game. If someone is responsible for building the engines
or the wing or a particular component, no one else is going to be doing that. And if you do just split all the components 50/50, you end up with a horribly inefficient program. To an extent, Scaff tried to get around this challenge with the best athlete concept. But even if you generally agree that the company leading a particular stream of work or component should be the one best suited for the task, that doesn’t necessarily always mean the end of the debate. And that’s before you even get to the question of sharing technology and knowhow. One of the reason to bring together multiple countries and multiple companies is because they have different technologies, different experience,
different things they can potentially bring to the table. And if everyone is willing to put that experience and technology on the table, they can potentially build something much more impressive together than they could do working apart. Problem, companies generally don’t like sharing that kind of stuff, especially with potential competitors. This is far from a new phenomenon. Back during the Second World War, for example, when Boeing was told to bring other companies into the B29 supply chain to ramp up production, to oversimplify, the company wasn’t exactly enthused. The B29 was a very advanced design for the day and their view is
what they were basically being asked to do was train competitors for the postwar marketplace. Now given there was a war on the United States government basically turned around and said tough get the planes built. But in the very different environment 2026 for governments it’s not always that easy. And even if a program can find a way to resolve that issue and some programs do also had to contend with another one of the greatest hits of multinational defense programs gone wrong. a fight over who controlled the effort. At the risk of greatly oversimplifying based on what’s been publicly released, the so argued that because they were the lead
system integrator for the man fighter component of SCAFF, they should enjoy significant practical control over that component, including supplier selection and what Trapierre described as clear leadership, even if France and Spain might be able to proverbally outvote France at the overall program table. The Soul put forward several arguments that clear leadership would help things move faster and that they had recent relevant experience in actually developing a fighter, which is true. That attempting to design and manage by committee had delayed or destroyed many a grand program of the past, which is also true. And so the program would probably move
faster and more decisively if there was a single party in charge, which is probably true. Airbus, for their part, seems to have argued this was a multinational program. The other companies were bringing a lot to the table. A lot of the money involved here was going to be German and Spanish, not French. And so it wasn’t unreasonable from a fairness perspective for those countries and companies to have a lot of say, which dare I suggest was also true. Welcome to the wonderful world of multinational defense programs. For many of these issues, the can had been kicked down the road repeatedly until eventually they finally came to a head. Historically, when multinational
development programs start to go wrong, often one of the big clues that’s happening is for some of the parties involved, corporate or political, to start lobbying for a split. In the early and mid Cold War, for example, France and Britain had a number of successful code-development programs, including the famous Jaguar. But when it came time to develop the Anglo French variable geometry aircraft, France eventually withdrew from the program, ostensibly on the grounds of cost, which helped eventually guide the UK into another multinational program, the one that gave us the tornado. MBT70 was a cold war era tank development program that was meant to bring together West Germany and the
United States. The end result was both sides learning some development lessons, but ultimately deciding to go their own way. The US ultimately developed and adopted the Abrams and Germany the Leopard 2. And perhaps an example more pertinent to recent events. In the early 1980s, the French were originally part of the future European fighter aircraft program alongside the likes of Italy, Spain, West Germany, and the UK. However, among other debates, France generally wanted a relatively lightweight multi-roll aircraft that could operate from aircraft carriers and Britain, would you believe it, wanted a relatively heavy groundbased air
superiority fighter. So, yeah, in some respects, we have seen this film before with the ending in that case being France going its own way to develop the Rafal, while the rest of the program members ultimately went on to develop the Euro Fighter Typhoon. And if you’re watching some recent events, you might have started to see simmery tensions and agitation similar to some of those previous breakdowns. By late last year, some of the key industrial champions involved were basically arguing they could go it alone. The Soul’s CEO, Trapierre, said that they had the knowhow and capability to develop a new jet fighter alone. Essentially, a
statement that boiled down to pointing at Airbus and saying, “We don’t really need you, so get on board.” For their part, at least one Airbus leader reportedly publicly came out and basically implied the same in the other direction, suggesting that the development of a new fighter jet could potentially be more efficient without Dissol, that bypassing the French wouldn’t necessarily harm FrancoGerman relations, and that a program without France might allow for faster redesign and construction of a new aircraft. You have to remember that from a corporate incentives perspective, neither of these leaders are necessarily wrong. In fact, in a vacuum, you could argue they’re
only being rational. Compared to a multinational effort, a national one would allow these primes to command more of the workshare, not have to share their technology, and also find things much easier from management perspective because there wouldn’t be multiple cooks in the proverbial kitchen. Most of the downsides of giving up on a multinational program only aggregate on the nation state level, not the individual company level. When you go multinational, you potentially save a lot of money, but that’s paid for by the government and the taxpayers, not the companies involved. In fact, they probably make more if they go it alone. The final design might also be better
because you’re combining technologies from multiple companies and multiple national champions. But a company might prefer to produce a good enough aircraft that it manufactures itself than an excellent aircraft that it has to share with someone else. In other words, make sure you keep in mind when you’re watching coverage around these kind of debates that while the worst case scenario for the companies involved might be for a program to be cancelled and for the work to evaporate, there’s an argument that the best case scenario is often going to be a divorce from the multinational program and the entire thing just being funded by a national treasury instead with 100% of the work staying at home. I want to be clear that
COLLAPSE & LOSSES
behind these big picture oversimplified observations, there was a lot more going on here. There was a lot of back and forth, a lot of maneuvering, a lot of dynamics between the different parts of the effort. We’re only talking about the man fighter, for example, not the work share or negotiations around the drones or the combat cloud. But at a B picture pitcher level, those are some of the big issues I’d already flagged in the past that put the program on shaky ground. Contested requirements and acrimonious industrial relations that would have required extensive political pressure to push through. And to be fair, we did see some of that. Leadership from the
involved countries met repeatedly to try and work the problem. Spain described the program as being threatened by, from memory, political and industrial audacity and openly lamented the final result when it landed. But what the countries don’t appear to have ultimately been able to do is convince the companies involved to cut a workable deal. And so after meeting after meeting after meeting, cankick after cankick in the last couple of days, they finally agreed to call it a day. The manned fighter component of SCAFF was publicly declared dead and instead Berlin, Paris and Madrid quickly pivoted to highlight
other parts of the program. The combat cloud, for example, is reportedly still going to be developed and implemented. Many of the drone programs likely will be pushed forward as well. But ultimately, this is now looking like a multinational air superiority program without an air superiority fighter. And so while a lot of attention has already turned to the frantic scramble for next steps, I think it’s worth highlighting for a moment whatever comes next, what has potentially been lost for the parties involved here. In terms of hard elements, two of the clear losses are time and money. Years and a lot of funding were spent trying to make this program work. And while some of those
efforts might be transferable or recyclable, some of it is ultimately going to be lost. And in a frantic scramble for rearmment in a post2022 invasion world, it’s hard to just scoff at the loss of a program that had a better part of a decade behind it. Militarily, it’s now possible these forces might be looking at further delays in getting the fight they think they need. And with the loss of some of the technical sharing between the two parties, it might not be as capable when it arrives. And it’s also hard on the soft factor side to move past the questions of symbolism and sovereignty. This was the only truly European multinational effort. If Scaff had
succeeded, it would have been symbolic of the ability of some of Europe’s major nations and economies to cooperate and to produce worldbeating defense hardware. It would have potentially reduced reliance on technology and hardware imported from elsewhere, especially the United States, help improve the military balance via VR Russia, and close a military industrial technical gap with the United States that’s existed ever since the emergence of F-22 and F-35 without a true sovereign European equivalent. It’s possible, some would argue even probable, that in the place of Scaff, something else will take its place. But for a European defense sector trying to
FRENCH PATH FORWARD
reassert itself in an era of rearmment, suffice to say, even if the program might have been doomed for some time, it was hardly a glorious moment. So, with the fighter program shot out of the sky and the dust now settling, what happens next for the major participants? And here, I’m going to start by looking at France. Because in some ways, the three participants, France’s next actions are probably the easiest to predict. One way or another, despite the collapse of the program, France is probably going to push on with the development of a next generation fighter. While the other countries are still publicly weighing their options, that’s already something they’ve said they’re going to do, with France’s
defense minister saying they intend to leverage the work that had already gone into the project and continue working on the fighter through 2040. Speaking of the future fighter, she reportedly said, quote, “This is obviously a major technical asset for our country’s sovereignty.” End quote. And I include that comment because it suggests both why we should expect France will push forward and also one of the reasons why Dour might have been so confident taking this thing to the mat. You should expect the French government to push on with a sixth generation fighter because to a great extent they don’t really have any other good choices. Unlike the Germans, the French don’t have a fifth generation fighter in their fleet they can
potentially lean on. Perhaps in the hope that drones can make up for some of the capability a sixth generation man fighter would eventually provide. And also they’re a major exporter. Arms exports are a major element of French foreign policy, a key factor in the French defense industrial economy. And some French leaders have emphasized just how much weight the sector can have. As one former French official reportedly put it, quote, do so is not easy. They have amazing engineers, but on the political side, they behave how they want. End quote. But in order to have a thriving, profitable export sector on a global scale, you need to have a product
that people are going to want to buy. Right now, for some customers, Rafal might make the grade. But as time and technology advance, there are only so many upgrades you can cram into a relatively expensive fourth generation platform. You can’t just give the Rafal a body kit, for example, and make it a stealth jet. And as more and more fifth and even sixth generation fighters become available on the global market, the French aviation sector just can’t afford to coast on this design forever. They need something new. That doesn’t mean the French won’t necessarily look for other partners in the program, although likely those who are willing to provide funding in exchange for access to the program, not necessarily the same
level of industrial participation or technical exchange that was expected by the Germans and the Spanish. There are some voices in India, for example, which operates a large and growing fleet of French fighters that have indicated it might be in India’s interest to try and step in here and pick up some of the pieces. The Indian military has publicly expressed interest in the past to join one of the multinational programs either SCAF or GCAP. But I think it’s worth noting any actual execution of that idea is probably a long way off and might face some of the same landmines that brought down the original program. India and France recently had tense negotiations for example because France
is very keen to sell India the Rafal and have significant industrial participation in India in manufacturing them but they were not willing to hand over the source code for the fighter systems. Similarly, an agreement between France and the UAE to co-und the F5 upgrade package for the Rafal also recently broke down reportedly in part because the UAE expected more technical exchange for France in exchange for their financial contribution than the French were willing to offer. In other words, I’d expect the French to say they’re very publicly open to multinational participation in their future fighter program. But the devils in the detail are going to have to be
overcome in order to make that actually happen. Now, from a purely technical perspective, the idea of the French designing and manufacturing a sixth generation fighter that meets their requirements is arguably entirely reasonable. There are some industrial capability areas where they might lag some of the others out there on the market, but they’ve designed and built their own aircraft for years. However, based on what’s available in the open source so far, I think that expressed confidence should come with at least two caveats. The first is that even if France pushes forward with a French-designed fighter, this isn’t likely to end up being an entirely French capability. As we noted earlier, the partners for the moment have said
they intend to push forward with other co-development areas like the combat cloud and potentially drones. So France might end up with a mostly French fighter that really relies on a multinational suite of tools to get the most out of it. But more pressingly for the design itself, I have a question about the engine. General rule, combat jet engines are hard. They’re often one of the last things a country ends up successfully indigenizing, even once they start coming up with their own designs. And there’s a reason, for example, you might see fighters built by the Koreans or the Swedes running American engines, while the engine was one of the last areas where the Chinese succeeded in replacing Russian imports.
The French do have a domestic fighter engine for the Rafale, but it’s not up to spec for what you’d expect to go into a sixth generation fighter. And so, as part of the broader AFC program, there wasn’t just a multinational program to design the aircraft. There was also a multinational program to design a new engine. And so, a question I haven’t seen a firm answer to yet is what happens to this thing? The most affordable mechanism might be pushing forward with the existing multinational arrangement. But from Paris’s perspective, that then means you potentially end up with a French fighter with a multinational engine, at which point it becomes a question of how much domestic industrial sovereignty are you
willing to give up in the name of international cooperation and presumably international funding. Because here’s the second kicker. While the Soul might have reason to be technically confident they can design and build a sixth generation fighter that’s internationally competitive, they’re not the ones who have to figure out how to fund it. And one way to describe the current French defense industrial base might be technically talented but fiscally fraught. France’s approach to defense sovereignty comes with a significant price tag. The country needs to be able to afford, for example, its own space assets, its nuclear arsenal, the delivery systems for those nukes, and a whole range of defense priorities
that add up to a pretty expensive plan spending program. As far back as 2023, the French government was already talking about a $440 billion roughly 5-year military spending plan. And that was in the context of the world where the potentially 100 billion plus dollar price tag of scaff was going to be shared between multiple parties. Without Berlin and Madrid around to pick up some of the tab, if Paris did want to push forward with minimal changes and full control over the program, they’d have to find the money to make up some of the difference. And in 2026, that’s no easy ask because France’s public finances
aren’t looking too crash hot. France’s current public deficit runs at about 5% of GDP, and the current accumulated government debt to GDP ratio is about 115%. Now, hypothetically, if France was going to lift spending to hit the new NATO target of 3.5% on defense, you can potentially imagine the fighter spending coming out of that cut of the budget. But on paper, countries have years to reach that target. And against the backdrop of these kind of challenging public finances, it might be hard to find an extra 10 or 20 billion euros behind the couch cushions. A rough summary here then might be we should
expect France to want to push on with the fighter design. They’ve said they want to push on with the fighter design, but in order to make that work, something or multiple things might have to give. They might have to sacrifice some sovereignty in order to bring in additional funding or cooperating partners. They might sacrifice the government deficit and find the money no matter the cost. Or you might see changes to the fighter itself, perhaps downscoping its capabilities and potential procurement numbers. The potential wild card, of course, could be the export market. To a great extent, Rafal is as affordable for the French government as it is, and the production lines are as healthy as they are because
of exports. So, you can imagine the French pushing forward with the fighter program in the hopes, as we’ve seen the Russians do, that foreign customers will carry part of the cost. The issue there though is often your customers will want to see that you have a winning product first before they agree to sign on the dotted line and hand over the cash. Meaning the French might have to push ahead and actually develop the fight at first with all the cost that entails. Essentially gambling that once they do they can put it out on the market and earn back some of those costs. Eventually that kind of worked for a but it was a bit touchandgo for a good number of years there. And so I think it
GERMAN OPTIONS
remains to be seen how a French government has traditionally been fairly protective of some of its higherend technologies might approach the topic of potentially exporting the most advanced aerospace product the country had ever produced. Then you have the question of Germany and in some ways you could actually argue they have more options than the French do. They’re not as reliant on having a fighter for the international market. Plus their fleet and financial picture also look very different. And so while this is an exhaustive list, I think there’s three main German options we might want to explore. The first is to just not do a sixth generation man fighter. Mets has already publicly questioned whether two
decades down the track air forces will still need them and thus whether this is a necessary investment in the here and now. If Germany did decide to mostly let the entire effort die, the question is what would you do instead? The most likely answer is probably just continuing to rely on a combined fourth and fifth generation fleet. You keep the Euro fighter around, potentially procure more of them, and then to fill part of the niche that otherwise would have been covered by Scaff, perhaps you buy more F-35s. F-35 might not be an exact match for what they were hoping the next generation fighter would be able to do, but it’s probably closer in a lot of respects, including stealthiness, than
something like Rafal or Euro Fighter. The advantages here, you skip an expensive and potentially risky development program. You go with designs you already operate and you continue to enjoy interoperability advantages with other allies operating these same platforms. There are still a bunch of Euro fighters out there and European F-35 numbers continue to spike. The obvious tension here is it would kind of be a bit of a flip on the stated German priority of greater defense independence from the United States. If the goal, as stated, was to rebuild the German defense sector and become more self-reliant as a country and a continent, investing billions in
doubling down on an American design for decades to come, might not exactly be the first option that springs to mind. So certainly an option the German defense minister has indicated the country might be considering, but not the only one. Ptorius did suggest the country could buy additional F-35s, but he laid out two potential alternative pathways. The second was replacing one European multinational fighter program with another European multinational fighter program. Only this time without Paris and with Berlin being much more central. Unsurprisingly, this is already an angle that German industry in
particular seems to be potentially pushing. Airbus Defense and Space publicly launched its team Gen 6 initiative with eight major German defense and aerospace contractors signing essentially a strategic position paper with the Bush seemingly being for Berlin to keep the sixth gen dream alive only under German leadership likely with the ongoing very close industrial involvement of Spain in the postgap scramble. We’ve also seen open discussion of other potential partners. An interesting example here is Sweden, a country with its own existing fourth generation fighter. A company SA which has been commissioned to do at least some studies into sixth generation
fighter concepts, but probably not a country that by itself has the financial and industrial heft necessary to push a sixth gen program through to completion at efficient scale. From Berlin’s perspective, going this direction has a couple of things that might make it attractive. If you’re trying to put your defense manufacturers on the international map, a sixth generation fighter program will probably do it. Keeping it mostly in house would simplify work share agreements and technology exchange while the Germans would also have more control over the specifications of the aircraft. Basically, there’s more chance here they get to design the fighter they want. The challenges of course would be exactly
what you’d expect. Delays, questions over capabilities and timelines. The list goes on. Compared to the French, the Germans are arguably in a much better financial position to fund this. Germany’s debt levels are much lower, its borrowing costs are lower, and it’s due for significant increases in its military budget that have already seen it leaprog ahead of the French. But depending on your point of view, it could also make an existing problem even worse. Before the collapse of Scaff, the argument was that Europe really didn’t benefit from having two different sixth generation fighter programs. Given the stress even the United States seemed to be experiencing running two programs in
parallel, some suggested the best approach from the part would have been to merge the efforts and cut it down to one. If Scaff breaks up only for the French and Germans to both continue in different directions, then the already fragmented European sixth generation effort would be further divided into three, which probably gets to why the final option teased by the German defense minister is Germany joining some other existing sixth generation effort. Now, while Ptorius only said that this option would involve Germany joining an existing international fighter program with six generation features, I don’t think you need to be much of a detective to figure Berlin probably isn’t talking
TEMPEST OPPORTUNITY
about signing on with Beijing or trying to invest funding in restarting PATAR over in Russia. Trying to sign on with the American F47 program would almost certainly be a non-starter and kind of fly in the face the idea of greater European self-reliance. By process of elimination, that leaves only one primary candidate. What if Germany and potentially Spain considered turning to Tempest? Because before you start getting into thorny issues like what Germany’s industrial involvement might be in a program that was considerably more advanced than Scaff from a purely military and financial perspective, you could see why there’d arguably be some
attraction here. Based on what we think we know so far, there might be a much closer requirement between what the Lufafa wants and what Tempest is likely to be than there was between German and French preferences within Scaff. Remember the three primary GCAP participants are Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy. The United Kingdom is basically after a relatively heavy sixth generation air superiority fighter to replace the Euro fighter and in the future operate alongside the F-35 and drones. Italy by contrast wants a relatively heavy air superiority fighter to replace the Euro fighter and operate in the future alongside the F-35 and
drones. And guess what? The primary German requirement is probably going to be for a relatively heavy air superiority fighter to replace the Euro fighter and operate alongside the F-35 and drones. That clearly makes the Japanese the outsiders in the program cuz they’re looking for a relatively heavy long-range air superiority fighter to replace various fourth generation fighters and operate alongside the F-35 and drones. No one here wants a carrier aircraft. They use the F-35 for that. No one here wants a nuclear strike aircraft because we’re relevant. They use the F-35 for that. There are still probably going to be differences. The Japanese
might put more of a premium on range than the Italians, for example, but it’s much more around the edges. And from what we’ve heard so far, Tempest is aiming for a relatively beefy aircraft with about twice the internal payload of the F-35 and considerably more reach. The reason this matters is because even though Germany would be joining the program late, likely too late to have much input into the fundamental characteristics of the aircraft, because the existing participants have very similar air fleets, very similar requirements, and very similar preferences, there’s reason to believe that in the grand scheme of things, the aircraft might be close enough from the German perspective. It may not be
exactly what the German leadership would come up with if they had their pick and preferences, but it has the advantage of being considerably closer to actually existing. It’s also worth noting that as co-development partners, Germany, the UK, and Italy actually have a lot of historical form. They worked together on the highly successful tornado which saw almost a thousand examples built and also on the Euro Fighter Typhoon, which all three continue to operate. Basically, while multinational programs by their very nature might be challenging, these are countries that have previously proven they can get it done. From military perspective, the proposed timelines were also much more
attractive. As you might have noticed, European planners are feeling a bit of time pressure when it comes to rearmment. And partly thanks to Japan being laser focused on a 2035 entry into service date. Tempest was meant to arrive well ahead of the delayed man fighter component of SCAFF. Meaning from a German military perspective, this might be a way to get an aircraft much closer to what you want, much sooner than you thought you were going to get it. It would also mitigate a lot of the risks around industrial capability that might exist in a purely German or Germanled effort. Between the various companies involved, they arguably already have all the primary bases
covered. And in a way, that might actually represent one of the greatest barriers to Germany joining the program. The Germans and especially German industry would probably want significant involvement in the production of their next generation fighter. But precisely because the Tempest is further along, a lot of that industrial share horse trading has already happened. So if you did want German companies to be significantly involved, say providing some of the components or doing the assembly of the German versions of the fighter, that would need to be negotiated, planned, and designed for. And as we saw with the FrancoGerman effort, sometimes that’s easier said than done. There are, of course, tools
available to do that. Even if you can’t balance an individual defense deal, you can use things that are called offsets in order to try and balance the overall picture. You might agree, for example, that the Germans are going to have less industrial participation they might like in the fighter and buy it anyway. But in exchange, the other participants might load up on German armored vehicles or German munitions and help balance the overall ledger rather than turning every individual program into an industrial trench fight. But as I said, even when these things make economic and military sense, it’s sometimes easier said than done. We’ve seen some of that shine through between the lines in the
statement from existing Tempest contractors. The CEO of Italian heavy hitter Leonardo, for example, has openly welcomed the possibility of Germany joining the program, saying, quote, “It would be a good thing in terms of capabilities and cost sharing.” End quote. But also issued a bit of a veiled warning about reopening the industrial share Pandora’s box. Quote, one also has to be mindful about the target date of 2035 for having the jet flying. End quote. Rolls-Royce has also been positive, saying that while the issue was one for governments, the company would definitely be open to Germany joining the program and also highlighted that more countries like Germany joining
would give the program one of the things it would desperately benefit from, guaranteed scale. Quote. But the GCAP benefit will be beyond that. More countries joining means more countries will certainly buy because you cannot be a partner and not buy. End quote. And while you could argue the decision might be a more complicated one from the German perspective, where they’re willing to sacrifice control in exchange for scale and greater panuropean and international cooperation, if you look at this from London’s perspective, it’s arguably a bit of a dream come true. Not just because it causes vague discomfort to the French, but because of the massive opportunity implicit here for British industry. I say that from three
perspectives. The first is that among Britain’s remaining high-v value industries, fighter manufacturing is still one of them. There are still some capabilities the UK and its companies have that are in short supply overseas and things like manufacturing fighter engines and jets are among them. From an industrial perspective, Tempest is hugely important. A lot of the skilled workforce and supply chain that would be engaged in manufacturing the Tempest is currently busy building Euro fighter typhoons. To an extent, you could argue part of that industrial system has been limping on on a couple of export orders like a recent one to Turkey in the expectation that relatively soon Tempest
will come along. If you don’t have them building something, you can’t keep the factories and workforce together. And once you lose them, it’s very hard to put the capability back together. Bringing in Germany could potentially add an additional customer, more funding, more technology, and give the program greater opportunities at economies of scale. And that’s before you consider the export market. Think about it this way. If you assume that countries that are serious about air defense might eventually want a sixth generation fighter, especially if they don’t currently operate a fifth gen, what are their options going to be? For most countries, the Russian option is probably out by virtue of not existing,
which leaves you with F-47 and whatever comes out of China. For a lot of countries, buying Chinese defense hardware isn’t quite on the diplomatic cards yet. Whereas with the American design, a there’s no guarantee the Americans will actually agree to export F47. Remember, F-22 was never exported. And secondly, even if it was available, there are significant chunks of the international market at the moment, including in Europe, that might be willing to pay a premium to reduce reliance on the United States and avoid an ITAR product. This is where traditionally you might see demand for European designs like Rafal and Euro fighter. But if now the French program
is likely to a slow down and b focus more on a lightweight carrier fighter than a heavyweight air superiority one, if the UK, Italy, and Japan, potentially with additional partners, are able to stick to the program and actually get an aircraft into service by 2035, there’s a real possibility they get to the international market with the first non-American and non-Chinese sixth generation fighter years ahead of any competitor. And if you can’t make sales under those conditions, you need better salesmen. The dream here from the incumbent’s perspective, especially the United Kingdom, is that by paying a share of a development program now, you can potentially benefit from global
diplomatic developments, including the collapse of the German Franco Spanish effort in order to potentially lock in countries of the platform they may operate for decades and secure the future of one of your high-v value export industries well past the middle of the century. On the flip side, not coming up with the sixth generation design to market might pose a massive export risk. The primary fighter export for both the United Kingdom and the French is a fourth generation fighter Euro Fighter and Rafal respectively. But just like you can’t run a business selling the same cracking design forever, Nokia 3310, anyone? Eventually, if these countries
UK BUDGET THREAT
want to preserve their export industries, they’re going to need a new product. It’s not just the American F-35 out there as a competitor. It’s also countries like the Republic of Korea and Turkey that are out there coming up with new fighter designs available for export that incorporate some new stealthy features that you can’t just retrofit into a Euro fighter or a file. The international competition isn’t getting any easier. And so if Britain wants to remain competitive, there’s a lot of pressure to come up with something new. With the demise of Scaff, it’s possible one threat to Temper’s commercial future is gone. However, it has to be said that one very important threat to the British
program remains, which is, of course, Britain. Now, I’ve been waiting on doing my nation study in the United Kingdom until the release of the defense investment plan. This is basically an outline of what the UK expects to spend on defense in the next couple of years and what they expect to spend it on. It was originally due for release in autumn 2025. It is subsequently being delayed and delayed and further delayed. And I need to stress, we don’t know exactly what’s in it yet. But despite some of the secrecy around it, uh, we have gotten a couple of clues with the content apparently being so good that it recently prompted the defense minister
of the United Kingdom to resign in protest. In an open letter, the former defense secretary said the plan quote fell well short of what is required for defense of the country at this dangerous time. The extra support is backloaded when the pressure of operations and imperative to speed up readiness to fight is in the first 2 years and it rises to just 2.68% 68% of GDP in 2030 when we will reach 2.6% next year with the investments we are already making. He goes on to say in his letter to the prime minister that quote after explaining to you that I would not accept a defense investment plan that does not give our forces the resources they need. I’m now left with no other
option than to submit my resignation as your defense secretary. End quote. After the resignation of the defense secretary, the arms forces minister Al Kahn would follow shortly thereafter. So, how on earth is all this tussling in London relevant to the collapse of a continental European program? The answer is, while we haven’t seen the final plan for sure, one of the rumored and reported inclusions is a delay to funding for Tempest. According to the article on the right there, the proposal wouldn’t be to cancel the new fighter, but to kick the can down the road, delay funding, releasing it years later than originally intended, and only start
adopting the fighter instead in the late 2030s or even 2040s. From a political perspective, this would avoid any suggestion you’re actually canceling the fighter while conveniently moving the future expenditure out of your forward investment plan and making it a future government’s problem. The obvious point to make, of course, is that with a program with this many moving parts, you can’t just put it in stasis and then pull it back out when you feel like it. If you slow things down, it’s going to have ripple effects for the armed forces, for allies, and for industry. Diplomatically, the allies you’re relying on to partly fund and build this thing, especially Japan, have been
adamant they want that 2035 entry into service date. That’s because that’s what aligns with Japan’s military needs. And it was that date that was part of what got them to agree to this process in the first place. So, if you do turn up in Tokyo and say, “Hey, mate, I know we agreed to 2035 as a target, but you know, money’s a little tight right now, so would you mind if we wait a bit?” You’re not going to win any diplomatic points. Similarly, unless you’re very careful, there’s a genuine risk that you lose talent, companies, and supply chain in the meantime, that by the time you get serious about building the fighter again, the people you need to do it have been scattered into various other
positions, and you find yourself having to spend even more time and more money to get back to where you were in the first place. After just having watched the United States, for example, desperately trying to reassemble its military ship building capacity and submarine industrial base after postcold war cuts, it might be strange to imagine the United Kingdom willingly risking its fighter manufacturing ecosystem in the middle of what’s meant to be a period of rearmment. But depending on the way the plan ultimately falls, that might be a possibility. Meanwhile, the armed forces obviously has to wait longer for their jets and potentially find a way to stretch the lifespan of the planes it’s already flying. The basic point is that
if you’re serious about being in the aircraft manufacturing business, you need to actually be constantly designing and building aircraft. It’s not really something you can do as an industrial side hustle. You have to be in or you’re going to be kicked out? Which leads, I think, to a natural question from a UK strategic perspective. Would delaying Tempest be stupid? And because, you know, I love a good hedge or measured answer, let me respond this way. It’s not what I would do if you’ve had to make hard choices. There are so many other programs that don’t have the same industrial implications, the same opportunities, the same diplomatic issues and opportunities of having
multinational partners who are paying for a lot of the program and who you’re relying on as customers, which I would probably be tempted to look at long before I cut at something this strategic. The Army, for example, might appreciate the advanced vibration therapy system known as the Ajax, but it probably isn’t going to exactly make it rain with export orders, and you don’t have multinational funding partners looking on with concern. Then there’s the more fundamental problem of using delays to try and control perceived cost. Because as a general rule, delays don’t always cut costs. They can actually increase them. What they do do is just make them someone else’s problem
in the future. Unless you come up with a deal to enable other partners to put up more of the money now and keep activity going and Britain puts up more money later or something, an actual delay would arguably be a case of a lot of damage being incurred for very little actual comparative gain. The reason I say this is comparatively simple. If you actually cancelled the program or agreed to take a step back and the other partners step forward and you just become a purchaser of the final aircraft, from a UK perspective, you would lose a lot. Support for that industry, support for that workforce, potential future export opportunities, the claim to be a world leader in this
area of technology development and production. But at the same time, you would at least save the money that you could direct somewhere else or that you didn’t have to borrow in the first instance. It would represent a traditional military versus non-military spending trade-off, guns versus butter. And while you can argue it might not be a great trade-off given other countries were carrying some of the cost and there were export opportunities here, in the end, the value of the trade-off is at least partially subjective. How much do you value whatever civilian spending or non-borrowing you can do instead versus how much do you value the loss to the defense sector and military capability?
On the flip side, if you make the investment as planned, you might get the aircraft on time, you don’t have to pay those diplomatic costs, and you might reap those economic and military benefits, but you have to put up the money. A delay, however, is a bit of a worst of both worlds option. You still piss off your partners, you still damage your industry, you still delay the military payoff, you might miss a major opportunity in the market and sacrifice some of your leadership position, your workforce, and your industry. And you still have to pay just a little bit later. So, it remains to be seen what will actually happen when the defense investment plan is finally released. And until then, it’s probably best to
refrain from further speculation. After falling a generation behind domestic designs and putting a lot of chips on the primarily American F-35, it’s clear a financially stressed Britain is going to have to make a hard choice. But if there was ever a moment to try and make a big play, rope in additional partners, and actually be serious about European defense autonomy and being a fighter manufacturing country, this would be the moment. In some ways, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to argue Tempest is perhaps the best opportunity for Britain to decide. Is it still the country that gave us globally competitive aircraft like the Spitfire and may do so again? Or is it just content to do what it can
SPAIN’S DILEMMA
when convenient? That brings us to the final participant in all of this I wanted to talk about, which is Spain. And the reason I wanted to do that is cuz it highlights the potential risk for countries that aren’t major military powers when they get involved in these kind of multinational programs. Because on one hand, they make perfect sense. They’re a way to get input in and your industry involvement in programs that you would never have the funding and scale to do yourself. Most participants in the F-35 program would have struggled to design and build F-35 from scratch by themselves. But by participating in the program, they could pay a fraction of the cost, do a fraction of the
industrial work, and end up with a shared design. The risk though, as Spain is demonstrating now, is if the program does go wrong, unlike Germany or France, shrugging it off and considering going it alone may not really be a practical option. Spain now doesn’t have an immediate plan for a next generation European fighter. And given the context of current relations between Madrid and Washington DC, the potential German or British workaround of just buying more F-35s in the short term while they figure out what happens next probably isn’t going to be on the list of Spain’s preferred options. That means either a major shift in military modernization
plans or Spain agrees to sign up with yet another program. As I mentioned earlier, German industry seems to have some voices interested in maintaining the Spanish partnership, but ultimately we’ll see. The key point is that France had neither the diplomatic heft to hold the program together, nor does it have the defense budget and industrial capabilities necessary to go it alone. I doubt that experience will be anything like enough to dissuade other middle powers from participating in multinational programs in the future, but it does highlight that when you get involved in a group project, your final results aren’t going to rest entirely on your own shoulders. So with that
CONCLUSION
reflection, where does that potentially leave the broader sixth generation fighter race? Realistically, we’re still a long way from the finishing line, but a lot of the competitors have already run into trouble. Russia is mostly stuck at the starting line with a lot of the resources they do have likely be dedicated to designs they already have and can produce, like the Sukcoy 57. Beijing’s progress is hard to exactly assess, but based on what we do know, it’s probably much more a question of what and when rather than if. The country has shown off multiple airframes, has enormous financial and industrial heft, and is already in the business of mass manufacturing fifth generation fighters. A People’s
Liberation Army Air Force 6G fleet then is probably a relatively safe bet. And partly because of that, we might say the same about the American F-47. While FAXX might still have a couple of budget fights and questions around timelines ahead of it, it’s hard to imagine the US Air Force taking its foot off the gas when it comes to its nextG air superiority lynch pin. There’s always the possibility of delays and program issues, and the aircraft we finally see probably isn’t going to be an exact match for a lot of the concept art we’ve seen so far. But even if we can’t be sure exactly when it will appear, in what form, and whether it will be available for export, whether in a
technologically downgraded form or not, it’s probably safe to assume we will eventually see it. It’s in Europe then, plus Japan, where things are probably the most up in the air. From what we can tell, Tempest is actually one of the more promising programs out there. It had a good selection of industrial partners who seem to be relatively well aligned on requirements and an ambitious entry into service date. And now with the collapse of the fighter component of Scaff, it might have an opportunity to bring in new partners, new money, new suppliers, and new markets. But first, it has to survive the Treasury Razor gang. And none of that’s to say that the end of the fighter component of Scaff is
the end of the sixth generation race for France, Germany, or Spain. Far from it. In some ways, Scaff always bore the marks of being a project of a different time. one where the threat environment looked very different and German defense budgets considerably smaller. Its development was always going to be an exercise that was politically attractive but militarily and technically difficult. And some voices might be making the argument that at least now the parties involved can move on and press on. For France, that means pushing on to build their own fighter, potentially bringing in new partners in the process. While for Germany, the choices are even more up in the air.
After nearly a decade, Scaff fighter is scrapped. But the imperative for Europe to try and design and build something like it is arguably stronger than when the program originally kicked off. And given just how expensive and challenging these programs can be, despite scas fate, a lot of the same factors that push countries towards multinational programs in the first instance, very much remain in place. And so only time will tell what, if anything, ultimately rises in the European jets place. And okay, brief channel update to close out. I think we first talked about FCAS/scaff a number of years ago. I think way back towards the end of 2022.
Even back then, the observation was there were a couple of factors that made the Franco German Spanish program a bit of an interesting one and there were a couple of tension points between the participants. Even by then 2040 had already slipped as a target date for the fighter and some of the participants weren’t exactly expressing warm and fuzzy feelings as to how the whole thing was going. Now, it seems we have the projected conclusion. And one topic I think I now might want to unpack more in the future is just the idea of multinational defense projects in general. what makes them tick, what makes them go right, and what often makes them go wrong. In any case, I have a couple of other potential updates in
the pipeline, but I’ll hold off on them for the moment and instead just say, “I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you very much for watching, and with any luck, hope to see you all again next week.
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Transcribed by Taubstumm.tv — Kein Ton.
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