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Analysis by Joël-François Dumont in Paris and Berlin — July 16, 2026.
On the eve of the 26th Franco-German Council of Ministers, a tribune signed by fourteen French and German researchers calls on Paris and Berlin to save the “combat cloud” — the last surviving pillar of the FCAS shipwreck. But everything suggests the outcome is already settled: the topic is not even expected to be raised tomorrow, while German industry has already taken the lead on the ground.
An appeal arriving at the worst — or the best — possible moment
On July 17, almost exactly the anniversary of the FCAS launch in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz will co-chair the 26th Franco-German Council of Ministers in Brühl and Nörvenich, coupled with the Franco-German Defense and Security Council. As we analyzed in our previous study on the foretold death of the Franco-German myth, this summit comes after a string of cumulative failures — FCAS, Eurodrone, MAWS, Tiger — which have entrenched, on the French side, the belief that a major program run jointly with Germany amounts almost to a guarantee of failure.[01] It is against this backdrop that Challenges published, the day before, a tribune signed by fourteen French and German researchers — among them Élie Tenenbaum and Léo Péria-Peigné (Ifri), Christian Mölling (EDINA, Berlin), Claudia Major (German Marshall Fund), Ulrike Franke and Jana Puglierin (ECFR), Samuel Faure (IRSEM), Delphine Deschaux-Dutard (Grenoble Alpes), Pierre Haroche (Lille), Olivier Schmitt (Royal Danish Defence Academy) and Hans Stark (Sorbonne).[02]
Their starting point leaves no ambiguity: the joint New Generation Fighter (NGF), the heart of the FCAS program, has collapsed, and no one should pretend otherwise. One pillar, however, remains untouched — the combat cloud, the shared software architecture, communication networks and satellite links through which sensors, shooters and decision-makers exchange and exploit data in real time.[03] Their technical argument is solid: modern beyond-visual-range air combat is no longer decided by the individual performance of any single platform, but by the collective performance of the sensor-to-shooter network. The connective tissue now matters more than any single node in the system. Any fighter — 4.5, 5th or 6th generation — as well as munitions, attritable drones or remote carriers, should be certifiable against this shared architecture.[03]
Their conclusion: the task is not to revive a platform arrangement that no longer has political or industrial foundations, but to turn this digital backbone into the core of Europe’s future combat air power. In other words, save the system, even if the aircraft itself is definitively lost.[03]
The topic that isn’t supposed to come up
The problem is that this tribune arrives exactly as, on the French side, an Élysée source cited by La Libre on July 16 indicates that the future of the remaining FCAS elements — combat cloud, communication systems, radars — is not expected to be raised at tomorrow’s summit. This planned silence is read, implicitly, as a sign of renewed disagreement between the two capitals.[04]
The very format of the announced summit confirms this reading. The Franco-German defense council is expected to advance on smaller, already-settled files — the conventional dimension of advanced deterrence, the Jewel ballistic-missile-detection initiative, space cooperation via Iris². The future MGCS tank program, whose toughest sticking point was defused in advance via the June 22 agreement on equal co-ownership within KNDS, will be mentioned “among others” — no substantive treatment is expected.[04] As we already noted, the most likely scenario is one of carefully managed communication: reaffirmed commitment to European cooperation, the KNDS agreement showcased as proof of a rebound, talk of resilience — without any of the structural causes of the deadlock actually being addressed.[01]
If this pattern holds tomorrow, the combat cloud will be no exception: plenty of rhetoric about commitment to cooperation, no binding decision on architecture, governance or timeline.
Meanwhile, Berlin has already chosen
What makes tomorrow’s planned silence particularly troubling is that it follows a string of German faits accomplis, largely flying under the radar while attention was focused on the Dassault–Airbus rupture.
As early as November 2025, the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) unveiled a roadmap for German combat aviation built around a project called CFSN (Combat Fighter System Nucleus) — whose description matches, almost exactly, that of a sovereign combat cloud.[05] In July 2026, a €580 million tender for that same combat cloud was restricted to German companies only: Helsing (the Munich-based military-AI unicorn), MBDA Deutschland, Rohde & Schwarz and Hensoldt — with no involvement of French industry, even though Thales is officially supposed to be the lead partner on the combat-cloud pillar of the FCAS program, alongside Spain’s Indra, a role the French group secured in 2019 after a tightly fought industrial battle.[05]
More striking still: at the cpm Air Force Tech Summit in Berlin, a German Federal Ministry of Defence official overseeing the FCAS program openly presented CFSN not as a side project, but as the structural successor to FCAS — the framework meant to deliver Europe’s first operational combat cloud, alongside a family of collaborative combat drones.[06] Germany’s roadmap sets out an explicit political goal: to make Germany the first European nation to operationalize an unmanned combat platform under this national framework, with a stated requirement of roughly 400 heavy combat drones, deliveries targeted from 2029, and a demand for national industrial leadership — at least one production line and one mission-system suite designed and built domestically.[06]
Finally, in July 2026, three German industrial giants — Airbus, OHB (satellites) and Rheinmetall — announced the formation of a single national consortium, backed by €10 billion, to build by 2029 an ultra-fast military communications network linking tanks, fighter jets and soldiers in real time. This project is explicitly framed as a choice of strict German sovereignty — even at the cost of distancing itself from the European civil-military Iris² program, which Berlin considers too slow.[07]
The Cloud Act paradox
There is a further, and no minor, irony in Germany’s choice to entrust the AI architecture of CFSN to a consortium built around Helsing — whose initial design, back in 2023, had been assigned to IBM. A combat cloud even partly steered by an American company potentially falls under the Cloud Act, the extraterritorial US law that allows American authorities to demand access to data managed by a provider under their jurisdiction — including source code, and including for foreign clients.[08] The paradox is stark: the one FCAS pillar being championed in the name of European digital sovereignty currently rests, in its German version, on precisely the kind of American legal dependency that neither Paris nor the researchers behind the Challenges tribune can afford to ignore.
On the French side, Éric Trappier himself has publicly expressed skepticism about the very concept of a “combat cloud,” which he describes as more vapor than operational solution — the real issue, in his view, being a command system at every level capable of delivering information to the various effectors, rather than an abstract cloud architecture.[09] General Jérôme Bellanger, Chief of Staff of the French Air and Space Force, takes the opposite view, defending this pillar as FCAS’s single biggest concrete achievement, one capable of directly feeding the future F5 standard of the Rafale.[09]
Why the dice already look loaded
Three factors combine to sketch out a balance of power that already looks frozen before tomorrow’s summit even opens:
The industrial timeline has already been decided. The German consortium is targeting a 2029 delivery, with a €580 million tender already underway and closed to French companies. A Franco-German political agreement reached in the coming months would arrive after the fact, on ground already largely occupied.[05][07]
The budgetary balance of power has flipped. The sharp rise in Germany’s defense budget, which we already documented in our analysis on the death of the Franco-German myth, marks the start of a lasting reversal of financial means between the two capitals, with Berlin now commanding significantly greater resources than Paris — a budgetarily dominant partner no longer has the same reasons to accept French industrial leadership that it once tolerated when France carried more weight.[01]
Silence itself is an outcome. The planned absence of the topic from tomorrow’s agenda is not a neutral postponement: every month of Franco-German non-decision is another month of operational and industrial head start for Germany’s CFSN. Any subsequent European agreement, should one materialize, would then be negotiated less as cooperation among equals than as French accession to an architecture already designed, funded and built in Berlin.[04][06]
What to watch for tomorrow
The July 17 summit could still spring a positive surprise — the Franco-German academic mobilization the day before is not neutral, and the French executive has a political interest in not letting a second FCAS pillar slip away after the NGF failure. Three signals will help judge, in the moment, whether compromise remains possible or whether the fait-accompli scenario has already closed off:
- An explicit mention of the combat cloud in the final communiqué, beyond ritual formulas of commitment to bilateral cooperation;
- A concrete gesture on CFSN governance — involvement of Thales, opening of the tender, or failing that, a binding interoperability framework between the German CFSN and any future French solution;
- Any clarification of the legal status of the IBM/Helsing architecture under the Cloud Act — silence is likely, but silence on this specific point would itself be a signal.
Failing that, the writing will probably be on the wall: after the Tiger, MAWS, Eurodrone and NGF, the combat cloud will join the list of shared ambitions hollowed out by national faits accomplis — and France will find itself facing a choice it could have anticipated today: negotiate its accession to an already-committed German architecture, or fund a national alternative on its own, following the model chosen for the Rafale’s F5 standard.
Notes
[01] “FCAS: The Foretold Death of a Franco-German Myth,” European-Security, July 14, 2026.
[02] Ifri, Security-Defence — relay and list of the fourteen tribune signatories.
[03] Table.Briefings, “Europe’s Next Fighter Jet Is a Cloud,” summarizing the Challenges tribune’s argument.
[04] La Libre, “Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz Will Try to Give the Franco-German Relationship a Fresh Start,” July 16, 2026.
[05] Politico (internal German Federal Ministry of Defence, BMVg, documents), relayed by Zone Militaire / Opex360, “FCAS: After the Failure of the Next-Generation Fighter, Is the ‘Combat Cloud’ at Risk?”
[06] Defense Archives, “Germany Moves to Reframe FCAS with National Plans” — account of Colonel Joerg Rauber’s (BAAINBw) remarks at the cpm Air Force Tech Summit, Berlin.
[07] Zone Militaire / Opex360 — announcement of the Airbus / OHB / Rheinmetall consortium, July 2026.
[08] GeoStrategia, “Defense Cloud: Operational Challenge, Strategic Imperative and Sovereignty Stake” — on the extraterritorial reach of the Cloud Act.
[09] Zone Militaire / Opex360 — Senate hearings of Éric Trappier and statements by General Jérôme Bellanger.
