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Friedrich Merz took to the podium at the ILA show in Berlin on June 8, 2026 to bury a nine-year-old program. Airbus had its replacement plan ready before the speeches ended. Paris had not prepared anything. The SCAF was not killed by an industrial dispute, it was killed by two military doctrines that nothing has ever brought together.
On the morning of June 8, 2026, AFP and Reuters received confirmation of the German decision before the Élysée communicated. Paris then indicated that the two leaders had each “regretted the impossibility for industrialists to agree on the continuation of this project”. This symmetrical formulation masked a unilateral sequence: Berlin decided, Paris recorded.
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The SCAF, Air Combat System of the Future, is the program launched in 2017 to jointly develop the successor to the French Rafale and the German Eurofighter, two fighter planes whose planned obsolescence makes replacement inevitable by the 2040s. The program combined, on the industrial side, Dassault Aviation as designer of the combat aircraft for France and Airbus Defense as German prime contractor, two direct competitors forced to cooperate by political decision.
Airbus did not wait for the announcement of the breakup. The “Team Gen 6”, in reference to the sixth generation aircraft that the program was to produce, was formed before the Merz platform. His proposal had been sent to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and to the Chancellor’s services even before the official opening of the ILA show. The program was dead. His unofficial successor was already subject to the government.
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Eight companies, zero legal personality
Team Gen 6 brings together Airbus, MBDA, the European missile manufacturer whose capital is Franco-British-German-Italian, and six German companies: Diehl, MTU, Liebherr, Autoflug, Rohde & Schwarz and Hensoldt. Its members define the initiative in these terms: “a joint lobbying effort”not an industrial consortium. It has no legal existence.
Spain is absent. A partner of the SCAF since 2019, Madrid has not been associated with this new structure. The presence of MBDA is precisely what allows the alliance to display a “European” label: its multi-nation shareholding prevents it from appearing as a simple German project. Its French subsidiary works closely with Dassault, which makes it a political display piece as much as an industrial player.
The BDLI, the German association of aerospace industries, had already campaigned in November 2025 against Dassault’s positions on the governance of the program, raising the threat of a “fighter jet production in Germany under threat”. In February 2026, with IG Metall, the metallurgical and aeronautics industry union, she pleaded for a solution with two separate planes. Team Gen 6 extends this sequence of pressure, initiated well before June 8.
The objective declared by an industrial source close to the matter: “make an offer in favor of the continuation of the SCAF project, even without Dassault”preserving the technological components already developed, the combat cloud shared between the devices, the accompanying drones, the engine designed by MTU, the Hensoldt sensors.
The bomb and the aircraft carrier
Friedrich Merz said the essential things on February 18, 2026, in the German political podcast Change of power : “The French need, in the next generation of combat aircraft, an aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons and operating from an aircraft carrier. This is not what we need in the German army at the moment. HAS”
This is the fundamental disagreement that nine years of negotiations have not resolved. France must replace the Rafale Mthe fighter plane embarked on the Charles-de-Gaulle aircraft carrier, designed to carry airborne nuclear weapons, an essential component of French deterrence. Germany has neither aircraft carriers nor a national nuclear arsenal. Designing a single plane that would satisfy both countries would amount to building two different planes simultaneously under the same name. These constraints relate to the sovereign strategic choices of each state; they are not negotiable on an engineers’ whiteboard.
However, the Minister of the Armed Forces Catherine Vautrin tried to find common ground in the spring of 2026. At the end of April, the mediators she had mandated were still demanding “ten more days” to render their conclusions. On April 24, on the sidelines of an informal European summit in Cyprus, Emmanuel Macron affirmed that the SCAF was not “not at all” dead. Six weeks were enough to bury him in Berlin.
Boris Pistorius summed up the state of mind of his government in one formula: “I know how important Franco-German cooperation is in Europe, but at the end of the day, you have to draw a line between reason and heart.”
What Trappier said in March
On March 3, 2026, during the presentation of Dassault Aviation’s annual results, Éric Trappier, CEO of the group, declared to financial analysts: “Airbus no longer wants to work with Dassault. HAS” He added: “If Airbus maintains the likelihood of not working with Dassault, the project is dead. HAS”
Three months before the official announcement, the boss of the French aircraft manufacturer publicly posed the equation. Pistorius, for his part, confirmed after June 8 that he was “in discussions for months with different actors” on an alternative project. These two statements converge towards the same conclusion: the June decision made official a break consummated in the spring.
Three billion invested, Safran on hold
Environ 3 billion euros were committed over nine years to a program whose total cost, from design to entry into service planned around 2040-2045, was estimated at nearly 100 billion eurosdistributed between France, Germany and Spain. These investments have produced studies, technological demonstrators, and progress on the engine and sensors. No prototype flew.
Dassault Aviation is not approaching this rupture from a position of weakness. In October 2025, the company delivered its 300th Rafale. 533 devices have been firmly ordered by France and eight export customer countries, with a production rate of four units per month. However, no initiative comparable to Team Gen 6 has emerged on the French side since June 8.
The most immediate question concerns Safran. The French engine manufacturer has been linked to the German MTU since 2019 within EUMET GmbH, a joint venture created specifically to develop the engine of the future combat aircraft. On May 21, 2026, during its general meeting, the general director Olivier Andriès still described the cooperation with MTU as“excellent” and indicated that the two companies had decided to “work together on the technological preparation of high-power engines on helicopters”. Since June 8, Safran has not officially taken a position. Join Team Gen 6 or wait for an autonomous French initiative: this choice conditions part of the negotiations at the Franco-German summit in July.
Saab, GCAP, F-35: Berlin is not betting everything
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Berlin’s decision to increase its defense budget to 2% of GDP, Germany has had financial room for maneuver not seen in decades. It is using them on several fronts at the same time.
Since December 2025, Airbus and the Swedish manufacturer Saab have been discussing cooperation on collaborative combat drones, autonomous devices designed to support and amplify the capabilities of a piloted fighter plane in operation. A first contract already exists: at the end of 2025, Saab signed an agreement with Airbus Defense 549 million euros to equip the Luftwaffe Eurofighters with the electronic warfare system Arexiswhich disrupts opposing radars.
The GCAP program is another avenue. Launched in December 2022 by the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan to develop their own sixth generation combat aircraft, a direct competitor to what the SCAF should have been, since December 2024 it has had an industrial joint venture bringing together BAE Systems, Leonardo and JAIEC, with an entry into service targeted from 2035. In January 2026, during the Italian-German intergovernmental summit in Rome, Merz sounded out the President of the Council Giorgia Meloni on possible German participation. She didn’t say no.
From February 2026, Berlin was also holding discussions with Washington to acquire additional F-35s, beyond the 35 already ordered in 2022, in order to fill the capacity gap while awaiting a long-term decision. Three tracks open simultaneously, none refereed: Germany is giving itself time.
The other Franco-German projects are also faltering
SCAF is not the only broken program. The MGCS, the tank of the future supposed to jointly replace the French Leclerc and the German Leopard 2, is at a standstill. The MAWS maritime drone has not progressed. The modernization of the Tiger helicopter into the Mk3 version is being silently dissolved. These programs share the same trajectory: initial political ambition, unresolved doctrinal differences, progressive stagnation.
The Franco-German summit in July 2026 will have to answer a specific question: what to do with the work accumulated over nine years? The combat cloud, the accompanying drones, the engine developed by Safran and MTU within EUMET GmbH represent real technological assets. Berlin has indicated that it wants to negotiate with Paris around“a small number of realistic and relevant projects” from the SCAF system of systems. Paris has not yet said what it is ready to put on the table, nor with whom.
