Germany has pulled out of a plan to build a new European-made fighter jet with France and Spain, the German government said on Tuesday, most likely scuttling the project and dealing a blow to European efforts to rearm and become less dependent on American-made weaponry.
The plan, the Future Combat Air System, was announced in 2017 by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor; the Spanish government joined the project two years later. The intention was for commercial arms manufacturers in the three countries to collaborate to build a new stealth fighter jet that would replace the Eurofighters of Germany and Spain and the Rafales of France.
The project stalled after two of those manufacturers — Dassault Aviation and Airbus — publicly fell out over how to manage it.
“It was an ambitious, large-scale European project that is now collapsing in the face of reality,” Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, said on Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear if France and Spain would have the will or the funds to continue the project alone. Their governments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The system was not the first joint military project between Europe’s central partners to fail, but it was among the biggest and most important to do so. The jet was expected to cost around 100 billion euros, about $115 billion at current exchange rates, upon its anticipated completion in the 2040s, making it among the most expensive weapons systems that Germany had ever invested in.
It has joined a long list of other European cooperation projects that were eventually discarded or ultimately completed by just a single nation, such as a jointly designed anti-tank missile, a maritime patrol aircraft and a frigate. A previous effort to build a European fighter stalled in 1985, when France pulled out, leaving Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain to finish the project. That jet, the Eurofighter, plays a central role in those countries’ air forces.
The failure of the Future Combat Air System comes at a particularly fraught time as European nations struggle to rebuild their militaries after decades of underinvestment and amid growing external threats.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe has been concerned that Moscow might threaten other parts of the continent. Those worries come as the United States, under President Trump, has turned away from Europe, insisting that the continent must do more to ensure its own defense. In response, Europe’s leaders have publicly pushed for more cross-border collaboration, in part to make themselves less reliant on American manufacturers.
The latest collapsed project has undermined those ambitions, said Ulrike Franke, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who focuses on European defense.
“One of the main goals was to demonstrate that Europeans can indeed tackle such a large-scale project together, that they are capable of doing it as a team and that they possess both the technological expertise and the ability to work together to make it happen,” she said.
The project had stalled for months and its collapse had long been expected in Paris and Berlin. During a podcast interview in February, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said that his country and France actually needed different kinds of fighter jets, raising expectations of the cancellation.
In a statement to reporters this week, the chancellor’s office said that the jet had been canceled but that the countries would continue to jointly develop a unified digital communication system for jets, drones and other assets from different European militaries.
