FCAS Is Now Falling Apart

Key Points and Summary – Europe’s flagship sixth-generation project, FCAS, is stumbling just as Russia grows more aggressive and the air domain becomes harsher and more transparent.

-The continent increasingly relies on the American F-35—an aircraft it neither controls nor can replace—because its own industrial base and test infrastructure cannot deliver a rival on time.

FCAS Fighter Mock Up. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-Meanwhile, the US is already moving ahead with NGAD and F/A-XX as software-defined hubs of manned-unmanned air warfare.

-Europe now faces a choice: accept deep, long-term integration with US systems or cling to the illusion that delayed national programs will restore airpower sovereignty in time.

Europe’s FCAS Fighter Problem 

Europe’s next-generation airpower flagship is wobbling. When the head of Dassault Aviation publicly concedes he no longer knows whether the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) will ever fly, the admission lands with strategic force. It reveals more than contractual friction or the normal turbulence of multinational procurement. It exposes a deeper structural problem: Europe is struggling to deliver a sixth-generation fighter within a security ecosystem that is evolving far faster than its procurement machinery can keep pace.

A continent facing increasingly aggressive Russian behavior cannot afford strategic uncertainty about the very platform meant to anchor its future air deterrent. Air dominance is no longer a prestige industrial ambition; it is the foundation of credible defence. Yet Europe increasingly relies on an American fifth-generation aircraft—the F-35—that it did not design, cannot modernize independently, and has not yet produced any means to replace. The gap between Europe’s strategic vocabulary and its operational reality is widening.

Beyond Workshare: The Deeper Failure 

FCAS’s troubles are often explained away as the predictable friction of collective procurement: work-share disputes, sovereignty anxieties, intellectual property quarrels, budget fights. All real, yet none decisive.

The deeper issue is structural. Europe struggles to sustain the industrial depth, integrated technological base, and defence-scientific pipeline required to build, test, and field a sixth-generation system on a realistic timeline.

FCAS Photo Artist Image. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

This shortfall is not about talent. Europe’s engineers remain exceptional. The constraints lie upstream. Sixth-generation airpower demands mastery of stealth shaping, advanced materials, sensor fusion built on artificial intelligence, human-machine teaming, distributed autonomy, and the capacity to run rapid, iterative flight-test cycles at scale.

It requires a defence-industrial ecosystem able to update software continuously, integrate new sensors and effectors across a kill web, and absorb operational feedback into development almost in real time.

Europe’s post-Cold War consolidation of its aerospace industry economized on cost but thinned the competitive ecosystem that once produced disruptive leaps in aviation. That thinning is now biting at precisely the moment Europe needs breadth, redundancy, and velocity.

The F-35 and Europe’s Uncomfortable Reality 

These constraints are visible on many NATO flight lines. The F-35—still the world’s premier fifth-generation fighter—has become Europe’s airpower backbone not through political pressure but because no European platform delivers comparable capability, integration, or survivability today.

European air forces now train and fight within an American-built combat cloud because nothing Europe currently produces can replicate the F-35’s sensing architecture, data fusion, or weapons integration in the battlespace.

FCAS Graphic. AIRBUS Handout.

This dependence reveals an awkward truth for advocates of sovereign European defence. The continent’s air deterrent is now tied to a platform governed by U.S. export controls, sustained by a U.S.-dominated supply chain, and modernized in line with U.S. operational priorities. None of this reflects malign intent. It is the predictable consequence of asymmetrical investment. The United States poured immense resources into fifth-generation airpower through the 2000s and 2010s. Europe did not. The result was always going to be structural reliance.

Russia’s Proximity Raises the Cost of Delay 

Ukraine has given Europe a brutally honest preview of the future. The battlespace is growing sharper, more transparent, and more dynamic with each passing year. Russian air defenses remain adaptive, its drones and missiles operate at a scale that stresses even robust NATO networks, and its electronic-warfare systems probe Alliance airspace with increasing sophistication.

And Moscow, too, is developing its own sixth-generation fighter, the MIG-41. Any conflict on Europe’s frontier would require rapid attainment of air superiority against an environment explicitly engineered to deny it.

MiG-41 Artist Rendering. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

That reality gives Europe’s developmental lag a hard strategic edge. Without its own next-generation platform, Europe must assume that the United States will shoulder the burden of high-end air dominance for at least the next two decades.

Yet American attention is stretched across the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and homeland defense modernization. The assumption of automatic American capacity—and automatic American willingness—to carry Europe’s air burden can no longer be taken for granted. Deterrence rests on air superiority. Without the latter, the former becomes fragile.

The Sixth-Generation Leap Europe Hasn’t Made 

The air combat world emerging in the 2030s and 2040s will be shaped by manned-unmanned teaming, autonomous strike networks, distributed lethality, and machine-speed decision cycles. It will reward software-defined aircraft capable of continuous updates, dynamic retasking, and deep integration with sensors and shooters spanning the entire battlespace.

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II assigned to the 56th Fighter Wing, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, performs a strafing run during Haboob Havoc, April 24, 2024, over Barry M. Goldwater Range, Arizona. Haboob Havoc is a total force exercise that provides a way for pilots from various bases to demonstrate their skills across a diverse range of aircraft, including F-35 Lightning IIs, F-16 Fighting Falcons, and A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, while also testing their abilities in different mission sets such as dogfighting and gun runs. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Mason Hargrove)

Capt. Andrew “Dojo” Olson, F-35 Demonstration Team pilot and commander performs aerial maneuvers during the Wings Over Houston Airshow Oct. 18, 2019, in Houston, Texas. The show featured performances from the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, Tora, Tora, Tora, and Oracle. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Alexander Cook)

NAS PATUXENT RIVER, Md. — An F-35 Lightning II test pilot conducts flight test Sept. 10 to certify the carrier variant of the fighter aircraft for carrying the AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM). As part of ongoing integration efforts, the Pax River F-35 Integrated Test Force (Pax ITF) team flew two days of test flights to evaluate flutter, loads, and flying qualities with two AGM-158 loaded on external stations. LRASM is a defined near-term solution for the Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (OASuW) air-launch capability gap that will provide flexible, long-range, advanced, anti-surface capability against high-threat maritime targets. The Pax River ITF’s mission is to effectively plan, coordinate, and conduct safe, secure, and efficient flight test for F-35B and C variants, and provide necessary and timely data to support program verification / certification and fleet operational requirements.

This is where the United States is already heading. The Air Force’s NGAD program—whose production aircraft will almost certainly be the F-47—is designed not as a traditional fighter but as the central node of a kill web. In parallel, the Navy’s F/A-XX initiative is advancing toward a long-range, unmanned-compatible platform optimized for contested environments and integrated strike packages.

In short, the United States is already building the sixth-generation ecosystem, while Europe is still negotiating its governance. FCAS is not delayed because France and Germany disagree over a fuselage line. It is delayed because Europe lacks the scale, integration, and test infrastructure needed to match the American innovation cycle.

Europe at a Strategic Fork 

Europe now stands at a strategic fork. One path preserves the political aesthetics of sovereignty—continue FCAS and GCAP, absorb the delays, and accept that their entry into service will trail U.S. sixth-generation systems by a decade or more.

The other path demands strategic realism—recognize that credible airpower today and for the foreseeable future requires deep integration with American systems, even when that grates against continental instincts for autonomy.

What Europe cannot do is cling to the fiction that FCAS or GCAP will restore airpower independence on any timeline relevant to current deterrence demands.

GCAP Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The battlespace is too unforgiving, technological change too rapid, and operational need too immediate.

Europe’s future in the air will be determined not by declarations of sovereignty but by mastery of the domain itself—where integration is strength, delay is danger, and self-delusions carry a strategic price the continent can no longer afford to pay.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.