FCAS’s Inverted Mirror
At bottom, the SCALP Naval syndrome is FCAS’s inverted mirror: where combat aviation collapsed under the weight of poorly governed integration, the navy collapses under the weight of non-integration born of the fear of being poorly governed. The two pathologies, seemingly opposite, produce the same result — strategic dependence on American standards, whether the F-35 in the sky or the Tomahawk and MK-41 silos at sea.

The real lesson of this FCAS-MGCS-Combat Cloud-SCALP Naval body of work is that European navies do not need a joint programme to sabotage themselves: the mere accumulation of rational national decisions is enough to produce a collectively irrational result. Twenty-five classes of frigates and destroyers, each sovereign shipyard guarding its own ‘family tool’: this is the tragedy of the commons applied to weapons procurement. It is no longer a matter of fantasising about an unrealistic industrial fusion on the FCAS model, but of doing the opposite of what killed FCAS: accepting that a single sovereign standard — French though it may be — is worth more than a multitude of national standards all condemned to strategic irrelevance.