The end of the SCAF “flagship project” marks a setback for Franco-German cooperation and European defense

François Picard is pleased to welcome Ulrike Franke, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. According to Franke, the project’s abandonment was “a surprise to no one.” While acknowledging that Dassault was often seen as “quite difficult to manage”, she says the deeper problem lay in a structural design flaw that brought together industrial competitors who “were never really incentivized to work together properly”.