“We expect a tender to be announced by the end of May and the signature of a contract by late July for the procurement of air defense missile systems. We are ready to provide more than 600 Mistral 3 to the Spanish air, naval and land forces,” Durán told Defense News at the exhibition.

She added that deliveries could begin as early as 2025 and span out to 2032. It’s unclear how the systems would be divided among the military services.

MBDA showcased three different models of missiles at the FEINDEF defense conference in Madrid, running May 17-19: the Meteor, the Brimstone and the Mistral 3. The latter is in service with French forces.

Spain is reportedly allocating €330 million (U.S. $358 million) for the launch of a program to buy anti-aircraft missiles.

The Spanish Army did not return a request for comment from Defense News by press time.

For MBDA, this is a long time coming. Durán said discussions around the country wanting to acquire the Mistral 3 have taken place since at least 2015, but efforts were put aside due to a lack of money.

However, the situation is different than eight years ago, with the Spanish government pledging considerable defense investments to meet the goal of spending at least 2% of gross domestic product on defense by 2029. NATO, of which Spain is a signatory, encourages its members to spend that amount annually.

The Mistral 3 short-range surface-to-air missile is equipped with an infrared imaging seeker and advanced image-processing abilities, allowing it to engage low-thermal signature targets such as drones and turbojet-powered missiles. In March, the company’s chief executive said MBDA is accelerating the production of the Mistral 3 from 20 to 30 per month as a result of the European-wide pressure to supply more weapons.

European countries are on a shopping spree as they look to both continue arming Ukraine, which is under invasion by Russia, and fill gaps in their inventories left over by donations to Kyiv.

Mistral missiles have been in production for more than three decades and are operated by dozens of militaries in different configurations around the world. The latest variant has demonstrated the ability to intercept a moving target at ranges of 8 kilometers (5 miles).

The aerospace company’s Spanish subsidiary presented its Advanced Fighter Jet Trainer concept last week during the biennial FEINDEF conference in Madrid, Spain. If selected, the AFJT would replace the Spanish Air Force’s Northrop F-5M and CASA C-101 Aviojet aircraft, which prepare airmen to fly EF-18A Hornets and Eurofighter Typhoons.

The AFJT is a clean-sheet design based on the Spanish Air Force’s operational requirements, Abel Nin, the company’s program lead, told Defense News on the sidelines of FEINDEF on Friday.

Currently, the aircraft is designed to measure about 46 feet from nose to tail, with a nearly 33-foot wingspan. The metal airframe will be damage-tolerant, resistant to corrosion and easy to repair, per Airbus.

Nin expects a prototype could fly four years after the program is formally launched. While the Air Force plans to buy at least 20 Eurofighter Typhoons to replace its oldest EF-18As, it may opt to buy more Typhoons or Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to replace its full Hornet fleet.

The AFJT will be capable of training pilots to fly EF-18As, Typhoons, F-35s and the Future Combat Air System’s sixth-generation fighter jet, Nin said.

The proposed integrated trainer system will feature live-virtual-constructive technology, and Indra is partnering with Airbus to develop simulators, Nin said.

While Madrid is Airbus’ main prospective customer, the AFJT could serve other countries. Representatives from the Mexican Air Force attended Friday’s panel discussion at FEINDEF, and company officials previously highlighted France and Finland as possible customers.

“The main purpose here is to initiate the project,” Nin said.

The Spanish Air Force submitted the operational requirements document for a new jet trainer in 2020, said Lt. Col. Jesus Gutierrez Gallego, who works with the service’s program planning division. The service doesn’t recommend a specific vendor, and now it’s up to the Defence Ministry to deliberate and decide whether Airbus will receive the contract, he told Defense News.

“We need it before the current system starts its sundown,” he said.

Air Force officials said the F-5M is expected to begin retiring from service between 2027 and 2030.

Ministry officials at the conference could not say when a decision on the trainer jet contract might be made, nor did they say whether any other companies submitted proposals for the F-5M replacement.

The F-5M has been in service for more than 50 years, said Lt. Col. Miguel Angel Marazuela Martinez, chief of the service’s 23rd Instruction and Attack Wing at Talavera la Real Air Base.

“The [training] system that we have currently is quite solid, and it’s been evolving for many, many years, but we have to help it out,” he said during the panel. “And we are going to do it with this new plane.”

The service is also investing in advanced technologies, including biometrics, artificial intelligence and data fusion, to more accurately train its pilots, Marazuela Martinez said.

Helmets equipped with cutting-edge sensors and biometric watches will help instructors define “what is the best learning curve of every single student in a personalized way,” he added.

The aircraft spent about an hour above the clouds in German airspace, as Gerhartz wanted to demonstrate some of the capabilities of the “fourth-generation-plus” Eurofighter to his U.S. colleague. But the visit also served as the kickoff event for the two air chiefs to begin planning a new major air-to-air exercise, to take place in Europe within two years.

The event, dubbed Air Defender 2023, will be a “trans-Atlantic reinforcement” of NATO allies and partners, Gerhartz and Loh said in an interview with Defense News after their flight at Neuburg, home to the Luftwaffe’s 74th Tactical Air Force Wing.

Dubbed Gerhartz’s “brainchild” by Loh, Air Defender 2023 will consist of a two-week exercise based in the European theater. The German air force wants to use all available national military airfields in the exercise, to exercise its role as a “strategic hub for collective defense,” Gerhartz said. Some partner-nations’ airspaces and airfields will also be used.

While it is still early in the planning process, the idea is for Germany to be the exercise “hub,” then participants will engage in snap exercises in areas such as the Baltic Sea or Europe’s southern region, he added.

The exercise, which he likened to the U.S. Army-led Defender Europe drill, will help allies hone interoperability between their assets, test their command-and control (C2) structures, and interact with various intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), space, and cyber capabilities.

A myriad of platforms will be incorporated into Air Defender. Loh said he expects the United States to contribute “everything from airlift, tanker support, fighters, including fifth-gen fighters … [plus] everything from space and cyber capabilities on down.”

As it stands, remotely piloted aircraft are not expected to be used, though. The Luftwaffe does not currently have the airspace structure to integrate RPAs into the exercise, a spokesperson told Defense News in an email.

The two nations’ air officials are currently in talks with their allied counterparts to flesh out who else will join the exercise, and what capabilities they can bring to the theater. The focus will be on the United States, as well as NATO allied air command partners, along with other countries in Europe, the German air force confirmed.

The U.S. Air National Guard can play a strong role in recruiting other nations through its State Partnership Program, Loh noted. The program links individual state national guard units with 89 nations around the globe, 23 of which are based in Europe.

The U.S. and its allies’ militaries are drawing away from decades-long wars in the Middle East, and the focus is now back on Europe amid intensifying tensions with Russia.

The war in Afghanistan had been “driving our minds for decades,” said Gerhartz. But since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, the relationship between Moscow and NATO’s member nations and allies has continued to sour, leading up to a severing of diplomatic ties between the alliance and Russia in October.

“Now, we are much more thinking of Article 5 operations,” Gerhartz said.

Loh added, “It’s about time to come back [to Europe] and exercise more over here.”

The deployment would allow the Guard’s strategic reserve forces to deploy to a new theater of operation after decades of being stationed mostly in the Middle East, he added. “I need them to start thinking more [about] our pacing threats — China, Russia — and try to bring them up to those standards. … What does it mean to be under the command-and-control structure of NATO, and how do we actually operate inside of NATO?”

As mission priorities are turning away from counter-terrorism operations and toward great power competition, allied militaries need to revisit a plethora of skills, operational concepts, and doctrines that were fostered during the Cold War, said Douglas Barrie, an air warfare specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

From the end of the Cold War into the 1990s, and up through the 2010s, Russia’s defense expenditure essentially collapsed, Barrie told Defense News. After 2010, however, “you see a renewed emphasis on modernization.”

“In terms of capability, the Russians now present a more credible air-to-air challenge than they did, certainly, in the 1990s and the early 2000s,” he said. “So you can see why we’re seeing renewed activity in the allied side of the house to meet this.”

Germany has an incentive to lead this effort to reinforce allied partnerships through a large exercise, as Berlin has “a ring-side seat looking at what the Russians have been doing,” Barrie noted.

“Traditionally in the past, since the end of the Cold War, Germans have been kind of conservative … in terms of the operations that they have gotten involved with,” he said. “This is perhaps a little more forward-leaning, but in that sense, it’s almost certainly to be welcomed.”

Defense News talked about the program with Miguel Angel Morin Martín, head of FCAS efforts at Airbus Spain.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What work are you performing on the FCAS program? What will take place by the end of Phase 1B?

Airbus is supporting the Spanish Defence Ministry in the system of systems operational definition as well as acting as prime of the Spanish industry in the development of the new-generation fighter demonstrator. Moreover, Airbus is the international leader of the enhanced low-observability technologies initiative. Finally, we are also supporting the other industries involved in the rest of the pillars thanks to unique know-how and expertise.

Phase 1B is focused on selecting the architecture of the demonstrators, validating technology road maps and starting the decision processes up to when the preliminary design review is achieved. In parallel, the overall demonstrator and development logic will be further elaborated.

How are you working with your colleagues at Airbus and the rest of the Spanish industry group to stay on schedule for this program?

Our process, standards and tools are available to ensure that the objectives on time, cost and quality are achieved. As an aerospace company with facilities in Spain, Airbus is already used to working with the rest of the Spanish industry, which is integrated in its supply chain.

What is the plan for the enhanced low-observability technologies pillar, which Airbus Spain mostly leads?

The ELOT pillar aims to provide a significant leap from the current state-of-the-art solutions by working on innovative and disruptive low-observability technologies with a holistic approach; that is, by considering all LO critical elements in the FCAS platforms and all different LO aspects impacting them (multispectrum approach including radar, infrared, visual and aural signatures). ELOT will pay attention to future threats by taking into account the evolution of sensors and effectors, and new scenarios in which those threats are coming from space.

Despite relevant efforts performed by FCAS nations on this field, there is limited experience in Europe regarding the integration of very low-observable, or VLO, tech in operational assets. Manufacturing techniques must be analyzed to cope with the complexity of managing those technologies within the production chain. In-service and logistics aspects must be introduced in the loop since we know the impact VLO can have on maintenance and fleet availability.

We started the identification of those key technologies, for which we intend to follow on with an engineering process. The level of ambition is high; our goal is to make the FCAS an ELOT reference among the sixth-generation air systems.

Which elements of the program benefit from extra stealthy features?

For the ground demonstrator for the new-generation fighter, we are actually looking into LO features. With regard to drones, we need to balance some key requirements related to cost and prioritizing the development of manned-unmanned teaming with the possibility to offer a low-observable performance.

What are some capability trade-offs when it comes to incorporating ELOT features into the program?

As we are still in the research and development phase, main topics under consideration are technological developments and its feasibility in relation to the development of operational needs. It is still early to comment or disclose further details on this topic.

The Luftwaffe will deploy six Eurofighter aircraft, three Airbus A330 tankers and three A400M transport aircraft in support of Australia’s Pitch Black exercise, scheduled for Sept. 5-23, 2022. The typically biennial exercise was canceled in 2020, and next year’s edition will be the first since 2018.

Germany is ready to play a bigger role in the Indo-Pacific region, and will start with this initial sortie next fall before developing a more long-term plan, said Air Force Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz.

This is the Air Force’s “first and biggest deployment” of air assets to the Asia-Pacific region, Gerhartz said in an interview with Defense News in October at the Luftwaffe’s Neuburg Air Base in Bavaria.. “It’s a strong signal to show our valued partners in the Indo-Pacific that we are with them.”

The main hub for the 2022 deployment will be Australia, but details about the actual bases have yet to be confirmed, the Air Force said.

The service also wants to integrate Singapore and Japan into the deployment exercise, a spokesperson wrote in an email to Defense News.

Gerhartz expects to meet with some of his counterparts in the Indo-Pacific region in November during the Dubai International Air Chiefs Conference, and will make additional plans afterward.

This air deployment would follow the August 2021 deployment of the German Navy frigate Bayern. The ship is to spend six months at sea, with stops planned in 12 different ports including in Djibouti, Karachi, Diego Garcia, Perth, Guam, Tokyo and Shanghai. However, news outlet Deutsche Welle reported in September that China rejected the planned Shanghai stopover “after a period of reflection.”

For now, Gerhartz is focused on planning the 2022 exercise, although he did not rule out the possibility that German air assets would return to the Indo-Pacific theater. “I cannot foresee if there will be a permanent presence,” he said. “But for me, it cannot just be: One year we are there, and then we are out.”

A longer-term strategy may hinge on Berlin’s new coalition government between the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats, as well as how the leaders of this new center-left government decide to approach the Indo-Pacific region.

Such a deployment will be useful for Germany’s Air Force to hone its strengths, said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who serves as the Pershing chair in strategic studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“It’s useful for the German Air Force to do this to grow their own capability,” he told Defense News. “You have to do some missions like this, where you go to the other side of the world.”

But European allies could assist its U.S. and Indo-Pacific partners more fruitfully by developing a “cohesive, cooperative approach towards the Chinese Communist Party in terms of diplomacy and economic power,” he added.

The Air Force’s deployment exercise is based on a series of policy guidelines for the region published by the German government in September 2020.

“With the rise of Asia, the political and economic balance is increasingly shifting towards the Indo-Pacific,” the Luftwaffe spokesperson said. “The region is becoming the key to shaping the international order in the 21st century.”

A year after the policy guidelines were published, the objectives are beginning to be met, Germany’s Foreign Office said in a September 2021 brief.

During Germany’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, the bloc’s Asia relations were upgraded “to the level of a strategic partnership in December 2020,” the brief stated. The nation has also extended its relationships with Australia and Japan, while opening up a regional German information center to expand public communications in the area.

The EU published its first Indo-Pacific strategy in September 2021. From a security perspective, the strategy noted the union’s plans to deploy military advisers to EU delegations in the region — currently to China and Indonesia — and to establish an EU cyber diplomacy network. The strategy highlighted cybersecurity; counterterrorism; nuclear safety; nonproliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and information manipulation as security challenges where the EU wants to work more closely with its Indo-Pacific colleagues.

Besides Germany, France and the Netherlands are the only other European nations to publish their own regional strategies. Paris first published strategies in 2018 and 2019, while Berlin and Amsterdam followed in September and November 2020, respectively.

Their overlapping warnings — that Russia’s aggression and deployments of missile systems in Crimea threaten allies more broadly — came in dispatches from each country’s ambassador to the U.S. Senate’s Europe and Regional Security Cooperation subcommittee ahead of its Black Sea hearing last week.

“Russia has established the large anti-access/area-denial (A2AD) exclusion zone on [the Black Sea]‚” Ukraine’s envoy, Oksana Markarova, wrote in her Oct. 29 letter, adding that Moscow uses the area as a springboard for its Syria operations. “The NATO’s ability to defend its member-states and provide possible assistance to the third countries (Ukraine and Georgia) has been severely undermined.”

“Growing militarization of the Crimean peninsula endangers not only the littoral Black Sea States, but also [the] much wider region,” the ambassador wrote, adding that NATO should elaborate on joint response plans in the event Russia undertakes an armed attack on the Black Sea.

Last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited NATO ally Romania and alliance aspirants Ukraine and Georgia as part of a tour to reassure the allies and to urge them to cooperate on the Black Sea. During the trip, which ended at NATO’s Brussels headquarters, neither Austin nor NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg unveiled plans for any force increases on the Black Sea.

“There is no change to our operational capability or deterrence posture,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth said Thursday. “We operate in the Black Sea and many other areas across the entire region on a regular basis, which is all part of our ongoing commitment and reassurance to our NATO allies and partners.”

The conversation comes as tension between Moscow and the West sunk to post-Cold War lows after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, its support for a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine and other irritants.

Along with its ongoing economic and diplomatic efforts, Romania said it is already spending $3 billion to expand its Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base ninefold with the goal of hosting an expanded U.S. and allied presence.

Its top recommendation is that allies create a comprehensive Black Sea strategy, but item two recommends Romania as a hub for increased joint exercises, pre-positioned military equipment and new forces. Right now, NATO’s tailored forward presence in the region consists of only a headquarters element in Romania.

“Credible deterrence can be assured only through solid presence,” read the Oct. 26 letter from Romania’s envoy, Andrei Muraru. “Increasing U.S. military presence in Romania in all domains ― land, air, and sea ― including a U.S. command and control structure.”

“Securing the NATO Eastern Flank in a unitary and coherent manner from the Baltic to the Black Sea, by implementing a single Forward Presence along the entire Flank that ensures stronger defense and reduces current vulnerabilities caused by the undeniable deterrence gap for the Black Sea region,” the letter continued.

Romania also reiterated its support for Georgia and Ukraine’s goal to join NATO, which is something Russia strongly opposes.

Beyond the U.S. helping Ukraine continue to rebuild its naval forces, Kyiv wants Washington’s backing for a NATO presence on the Black Sea akin to NATO’s forward presence on the Baltic Sea. NATO maintains four multinational battalion-size battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Another of Ukraine’s recommendations is: “To intensify NATO’s rotating naval presence in the Black Sea, to support the freedom of navigation and facilitate trade routes.”

While the complicated politics and history of the region make it difficult to develop either a regional or NATO-led approach, some experts believe Russia’s stepped-up military activities could be a galvanizing force ― if the U.S. leads the way. NATO ally Turkey, which dominates the Black Sea, has historically been reluctant toward a Western military presence there and shares close but complicated ties with Moscow.

At last week’s hearing on the Black Sea, Ian Brzezinski, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy under the George W. Bush administration, suggested that the U.S., if Turkey is initially resistant, get creative and form a regional coalition of nations.

“Stand it up, prove its value, and next thing you know, you’ll have a country like Turkey knocking on the door and saying: ‘How can I be part of it?’ And that’s how all of a sudden it becomes a NATO organization,” he said.

Brzezinski, among experts who testified in favor of a Western-led Black Sea strategy and military presence, suggested that presence could include an intelligence fusion cell, coastal batteries and land forces backed up by a U.S. brigade combat team in Romania and Bulgaria.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, is irritated by other Western action on the Black Sea.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 1 emphasized the need to strengthen the country’s air defenses, he pointed to NATO’s military activities near Russian borders. That included the deployment of NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense components in Eastern Europe and increasingly frequent missions by NATO ships near Russian waters in the Baltic and Black seas.

“We must further improve our air and space defense system as leading powers have been developing prospective high-speed strike weapons,” Putin said during a meeting in Sochi with Russian military leaders. “It’s also warranted by the military-political situation, including increasingly intensive flights by NATO aircraft near Russia and the appearance of the alliance’s warships armed with guided missiles in the Baltic and Black Seas.”

Russia recently suspended its mission at NATO and ordered the closure of the alliance’s office in Moscow after NATO had withdrawn the accreditation of eight Russian officials at NATO headquarters, saying it believed they had been secretly working for Russian intelligence. The deployment of U.S. and other NATO ships near waters it claims as its own are another source of tension.

“Even now, a U.S. warship has entered the Black Sea, and we can see it in binoculars or crosshairs of our defense systems,” Putin said in an apparent reference to the deployment of the U.S. destroyer Porter, which had sailed into the Black Sea and was to be joined this week by Mount Whitney, the flagship of the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The feature is meant to give operators the ability to command nearby vehicles via remote-control panels, effectively turning them into pilotless platforms at the push of a button. The capability works with vehicles already equipped with a drive-by-wire architecture as well as those that boast a traditional, manual-steering setup, GDELS-Santa Bárbara Sistemas engineering director David Lugo told Defense News.

The company presented an ASCOD here equipped with two control panels capable of steering both fellow tanks and a newly developed unmanned ground vehicle sporting a gun turret. One of the panels is solely dedicated to that vehicle’s weapon, whereas the other controls movement, per the Spanish Army’s requirements, Lugo explained.

Paid for from the company’s own coffers, the setup will enable GDELS to tap into the growing market for the remote and autonomous driving of vehicles, large and small.

“The system has already been successfully installed on an ASCOD tracked platform and is being tested for various use cases,” a GDELS statement read. “This project is being carried out in collaboration with SENER and the University Institute for Automotive Research (INSIA), part of the Polytechnic University of Madrid.”

As it stands, the system boasts no “brains” that would enable autonomous route navigation or a follow-me type of mode, but those features are next up for development, said Lugo.

The remote-driving concept could be implemented in the British Ajax lineup, for example, which is based on the ASCOD, he added.

The robotic vehicle displayed at the company’s FEINDEF booth came with a six-wheel drive chassis, though tracked versions are possible, according to company officials. The 12.7mm remote weapon station can be swapped for a cargo bed, for example, making the robot a potential multipurpose wingman on the battlefield.

Powered through electric propulsion, the robot’s maximum payload is 500 kilograms in the eight-wheel drive configuration, according to a company statement.

The country formally signed onto the Franco-German program in 2019, with the objective of not only equipping its armed forces with the latest generation of weapon systems, but ensuring its own companies receive equal workshare in the program alongside their colleagues from Paris and Berlin, military officials said during the biennial FEINDEF conference in Madrid, Spain.

A key factor in Spain’s decision to participate in the program was to “gain capabilities” and ensure more autonomy for its national industrial base, Spanish Air Force Col. Luis Villar Coloma said during a Wednesday panel at the show.

Coloma leads the Defence Ministry’s sub-directorate for planning, technology and innovation. He noted that the dual-use technologies in development for the Future Combat Air System, or FCAS — meaning they can be used in civilian and military settings — will serve as a “strategic element for national defense and for the national economy.”

As the program tiptoes into the research and development phase — dubbed “1B” and expected to start in 2022 — Spanish companies are integrated into all seven technology pillars.

Indra is the country’s main industry partner, while Dassault represents French companies and Airbus leads Germany’s industrial participation. Indra is also the prime contractor for developing new sensors as well as a partner to build the advanced combat cloud and simulation systems.

Airbus’ Spanish subsidiary represents Madrid in the next-generation fighter pillar and is the overall leader for low-observability/stealth technology. ITP Aero is helping develop the advanced jet engine.

Spain contributes to the remote carrier pillar via the coalition SATNUS, or Spanish Alliance of Technologies for NGWS Unmanned Systems. SATNUS, established in May, includes companies SENER Aerospacial, GMV and Tecnobit-Grupo Oesia.

Additional local companies and subsidiaries are expected to get involved in phases 1B and 2, when the demonstrators will be launched. Those phases are scheduled to run for nearly a decade, with a fighter prototype expected by 2027, and manufacturing slated to begin in 2030 to have an operational “system of systems” online by 2040.

Madrid intends to ensure its industrial base retains at least one-third of the workshare throughout the program’s life cycle. The Defence Ministry has drawn up an industrial and technological plan to better support its base, and spoke to more than 170 companies to frame that plan, said Spanish Army Lt. Col. Jose Manuel Chaves, who supports the ministry’s defense industrial policy division.

Spain’s involvement in the program thus far has employed more than 220 people and supports companies spanning more than 75 percent of the Spanish territory, Chaves noted. That number is expected to grow as the next two phases move along, and Madrid has committed €2.5 billion (U.S. $2.9 billion) to the technology development phase, per the ministry.

For industry leaders, FCAS is a chance for the local enterprise to show the rest of Europe what it’s capable of producing.

There is “tremendous opportunity” for the Spanish workforce to help create the cutting-edge technologies of the future, “if we have the ambition,” said Miguel Angel Morin Martín, Airbus Spain’s FCAS leader. The country boasts “highly qualified engineers” ready and eager to participate, even if they don’t have as much experience in some technological areas as their French and German colleagues, he noted.

“I think FCAS may be the unique opportunity to take up the challenge and to start working,” Morin Martín added.

The technologies and capabilities under development for FCAS have the potential to “completely transform the defense sector” over the next 10 years, said Indra FCAS director Manuel Rodriguez Cerezo.

He acknowledged the road through such a transformation will not be easy, and said the industrial sector is not “naive” about the challenges ahead. But it will be done in the “best spirit of cross-industry collaboration” to make the most of national capabilities and cooperate further with France and Germany “to strengthen European integration together,” he added.

Industry officials expect the much-awaited R&D phase to begin by early 2022. In September, leaders from the three governments formalized an agreement to move ahead to the next stage, but the major industry representatives must also complete their own contract.

Airbus, Dassault and Indra are finalizing that contract, and it should be signed by the end of the year after “fine-tuning” the role of each company within the seven pillars, Rodriguez Cerezo told Defense News at the conference.

“We have to be sure that all the agreements are perfectly established before signing the global document,” he said.

At issue is how both sides of the Atlantic can bridge the opposing poles of competition and cooperation as they seek to connect their defense industries in search of better capabilities for all, according to Jed Royal, deputy director of the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

“We need to talk increasingly about a trans-Atlantic industrial base,” he said during a panel discussion at the FEINDEF international defense exhibit. While there are lots of political decisions still in play toward that end, a focus on partnerships would eventually make it so, he said.

Still, the devil is in the details. Working on European defense issues through channels other than NATO is in many ways new for Washington. And the American reflex of using its outsized industrial influence in the alliance is met by a European bloc eager to sharpen its own sword.

For example, various administrative arrangements with the U.S. government, as they are known in EU parlance, have yet to come to fruition. The bureaucratic-sounding deals are essential in defining the scope and authorities for any activity member states extend to outsiders.

Such an agreement is still elusive, for example, in a program aimed at improving “military mobility” in Europe, a reference to easing the cross-border flow of hardware and troops in the event of a crisis. A project under the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, umbrella was opened to U.S. participation earlier this year, to great fanfare, but unfinished negotiations over an administrative pact continue to sideline the Pentagon.

“The United States is very pleased to be given permission to work within the PESCO military mobility project. It’s an excellent start, and we’re very grateful for that opportunity,” Royal said during the panel discussion. But “we think that the lack of an administrative arrangement right now unnecessarily hinders our ability to cooperate.”

Such is the nature of the U.S.-EU defense relationship so far: Amicability abounds, but common ground remains elusive behind a slate of technicalities.

There is also the question of whether a common, trans-Atlantic pool of defense companies is even desirable. Thierry Carlier, the director of international development at the French military acquisition office DGA flagged “sovereignty” and the need to prevent “dependency” as key features of any emerging defense-industrial agenda.

EU officials have been worried an overly enthusiastic embrace of the U.S. defense contractor ecosystem, which feeds on a $700 billion national budget, could make quick work of an industrial landscape on the continent struggling to streamline itself while remaining equitable for all member nations.

France welcomes negotiations between the European Defence Agency and the United States on an administrative agreement, Carlier said. “We expect lots of positive outcomes.”

At the same time, he suggested a greater focus on interoperability could help bring together the two continents where a focus on cooperative programs that risk falling short of national requirements cannot.

“If we travel a bit into the future — not that far — there could be a race between U.S. sixth-gen fighters with their loyal wingmen and the French-German-Spanish new-generation fighters with their remote carriers,” Carlier said, with a nod to the trinational Future Combat Air System.

Bridging those interoperability gaps should be a priority, he argued, with NATO as a key player in harmonizing the relevant links and standards.

“I believe we can share more, in terms of interoperability layers and expanding out cooperation to new technologies to a much bigger extent than we have in the past,” Carlier said.

In the end, Royal said, the amount of political will on both sides of the Atlantic will be critical in forging a U.S.-EU defense relationship. “We often think of political will when it comes to the moment of the use of force,” he said. “But we also need to be thinking about preparing and organizing ourselves for the use of force.”

The industrial base part, he argued, is part of that calculus.