Europe's five-nation drone defence pact: fast fix or familiar fragmentation?
France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK signed the LEAP drone defence agreement in Kraków, promising cheap interceptors by 2027. The programme addresses a genuine capability gap — but must overcome the industrial habits and institutional clutter that have defeated every previous attempt at...
Five Flags, One Sky
Europe’s five largest defence powers cannot agree on a rifle calibre, a tank chassis, or a fighter jet. Yet on February 21, 2026, in Kraków, the defence ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to jointly develop cheap drones and the weapons to kill them. The programme, titled Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms — LEAP — promises its first deliverable by 2027. If it works, it will be the fastest collaborative defence programme in European history. That alone should invite scepticism.
The case for LEAP is grounded in an uncomfortable asymmetry. Europe spends a projected €381 billion on defence annually, yet its ability to detect and destroy a $1,000 drone remains, by its own admission, “alarmingly inconsistent”. The European Defence Agency flagged counter-unmanned aerial systems as a “critical gap” in its 2024 capability review, with 18 member states acknowledging the shortfall. Ukraine fires through roughly 1,500 anti-drone systems a day. No European country could sustain that rate for a week.
LEAP aims to close this gap not through the usual decade-long procurement ritual but through speed and cheapness — two words that rarely appear in European defence contracts. Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, described LEAP’s scope as covering “joint development of drone-based strike capabilities, low-cost joint production, and joint procurement of drone effectors, i.e., combat payloads, using artificial intelligence.” The UK’s defence minister, Luke Pollard, put it more plainly: “We need to make sure that we’re matching the cost of the threats with the cost of defense.”
That formula — cost matching — is the right diagnosis. Whether LEAP is the right prescription depends on whether five nations can escape a gravitational pull that has defeated every previous attempt at European defence consolidation.
A €110 Billion Habit
European defence fragmentation is not a bug. It is a feature, lovingly maintained by national treasuries, domestic arms firms, and procurement officers who rotate between the two. Approximately 80 per cent of EU defence spending flows through national procurement systems. Three-quarters of defence contracts go to domestic firms. The European Commission estimates the annual cost of this non-cooperation at between €27.5 billion and €110 billion — a range so wide it reveals how little anyone truly knows, and so large that even the lower bound exceeds the entire defence budget of most member states.
The history of joint programmes reinforces the pessimism. The Eurofighter Typhoon, launched in 1983, took 20 years to enter service. It cost roughly three times its original estimate. Four nations participated; each demanded its own assembly line, its own work-share, its own avionics variants. A US Naval Postgraduate School study of the Eurofighter programme concluded that multinational collaboration added cost rather than reducing it, because each partner’s industrial-return requirements turned engineering decisions into diplomatic negotiations. The A400M transport aircraft, the NH90 helicopter, the FREMM frigate — each tells a similar story. Collaboration meant duplication dressed in unity’s clothing.
LEAP’s architects know this history. Their answer is to bypass it. The E5 format — five nations, no EU institutional overhead — is deliberately lean. It sits outside both the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation framework and NATO’s formal procurement channels. It draws instead on a minilateral model: small enough for speed, large enough for scale. The Heinrich Böll Foundation describes this as part of a broader trend toward a “phalanx of defence pacts” — ad hoc coalitions that work around Brussels rather than through it.
This approach has a logic. PESCO, the EU’s flagship defence cooperation mechanism, launched in 2017 with 47 projects. Most have stalled. A Martens Centre policy brief published in February 2026 places PESCO “at the crossroads,” noting that its counter-UAS project, JEY-CUAS, has produced studies rather than systems. The EU’s own Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, published in October 2025, sets a target of organising 40 per cent of procurement jointly by 2027. Current levels sit below 20 per cent.
Against this backdrop, LEAP’s minilateral format looks less like fragmentation and more like triage. But triage is not cure.
Baroque Weapons for a Disposable War
The deeper tension in LEAP sits not in its governance but in its industrial logic. Europe’s defence primes — Leonardo, Thales, Rheinmetall, MBDA, HENSOLDT — evolved under a set of constraints that are structurally hostile to what LEAP demands.
These firms build exquisite systems. Rheinmetall’s Skynex air-defence platform, which Italy ordered for €73 million per battery, exemplifies the model: modular, NATO-interoperable, beautifully integrated, and wildly expensive relative to the threats it must defeat. IRIS-T, Skyshield, and their cousins occupy the same niche. They are designed for a world where each interceptor engages a high-value target — a cruise missile, a manned aircraft. Drone swarms invert that calculus. When an attacker can field a hundred $500 drones, the defender who fires a hundred $50,000 interceptors is not winning. The defender is haemorrhaging.
Ukraine grasped this before anyone in western Europe. Its defence sector has exploded since 2022 — 700 manufacturers, more than 300,000 technicians, many of them new firms born from volunteer collectives and Telegram channels where engineers shared improvised designs. These operations optimise for speed and unit cost. A Ukrainian FPV drone costs a few hundred dollars, built from commercial-off-the-shelf microchips jury-rigged in workshops. The knowledge that makes this possible is tacit — embodied in people, not manuals. It resists codification.
LEAP explicitly invokes Ukrainian expertise. The programme is “positioned as an industrial measure” to “reduce fragmentation across national programmes” while drawing on frontline innovation. But translating guerrilla engineering into standardised European production raises a question that no signing ceremony can answer: can firms built to produce artisanal weapons at artisanal volumes pivot to producing disposable ones at industrial scale?
The honest answer is: not without pain. Europe’s defence-industrial culture rewards prestige. Parliamentary photo opportunities favour gleaming prototypes, not ugly mass-manufactured interceptors. Export brochures emphasise sophistication. Procurement officers build careers on programmes that last decades, not months. Every incentive in the system pushes toward the bespoke. LEAP’s stated ambition — cheap, fast, autonomous — requires the opposite.
This is where the Ukrainian parallel grows instructive and uncomfortable. Ukraine’s Brave1 accelerator and the ministry of digital transformation’s goal of 100 per cent AI-equipped drones by a target date demand something that European firms have never been forced to do: treat weapons as consumables. Not platforms to be maintained for 30 years, but effectors to be spent in hours. The production paradigm is closer to consumer electronics than to traditional munitions.
LEAP’s success hinges on whether the E5 nations can force their industrial champions into this unfamiliar mode — or whether LEAP’s contracts will be captured by the same primes, producing the same gold-plated systems under a new acronym.
The Institutional Thicket
Even if LEAP’s industrial logic holds, it must navigate a landscape so cluttered with overlapping initiatives that the acronyms alone could fill a procurement document.
The EU launched its own Drone and Counter-Drone Action Plan on February 11, 2026 — nine days before LEAP was signed. That plan proposes an “EU Trusted Drone” label, strengthened testing capacity, and coordinated public procurement. The Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 includes four flagship initiatives: the Eastern Flank Watch, the European Drone Defence Initiative (EDDI), the European Air Shield, and the European Space Shield. NATO runs its own Integrated Air and Missile Defence programme. Germany leads the European Sky Shield Initiative. PESCO has its JEY-CUAS project. Individual nations run parallel national programmes.
The result is an institutional ecosystem that resembles a city where seven authorities each maintain separate water mains running under the same street, none of them connected.
LEAP’s defenders argue that its minilateral structure avoids this thicket. It does not require 27-member consensus. It does not answer to the European Defence Agency. It does not need European Parliament approval. The UK — no longer an EU member — participates as an equal. Speed comes from smallness.
But avoidance is not resolution. LEAP’s systems must still integrate with NATO command-and-control protocols. They must interoperate with EDDI’s layered network. They must avoid duplicating what JEY-CUAS, ESSI, and national programmes are already building. The risk is not that LEAP fails in isolation. The risk is that LEAP succeeds as a standalone system that cannot talk to anything else — a well-built silo in a field of silos.
One signal from the research deserves attention: Skynex is marketed for its “modularity” and “open architecture,” yet its actual constraint is C2 integration. Modularity in procurement-speak often masks lock-in. If LEAP’s systems require specific integration with specific prime contractors’ architectures, the promised openness could calcify into the same vendor dependency that existing programmes exhibit. Five nations procuring different variants of the same nominally interoperable platform is not consolidation. It is fragmentation with a shared logo.
Why Now, and Why These Five
LEAP’s timing is not accidental. Three forces converge.
First, Ukraine demonstrated that drone warfare is not a future problem but a present one. Russia sustains roughly 20,000 artillery rounds daily, supplemented by Shahed-pattern drones that cost a fraction of the interceptors meant to stop them. European nations watching this from across a border measured in hundreds of kilometres — Poland most acutely — understand that the same threat model applies to them.
Second, American reliability is newly uncertain. The Centre for European Reform and others have documented a growing European consensus that the US security umbrella can no longer be assumed permanent. LEAP is partly an insurance policy against American withdrawal — though this framing contains its own irony, since Ukraine’s viability as LEAP’s knowledge source depends entirely on continued American weapons supply.
Third, the five signatories represent a specific political arithmetic. France and Germany bring industrial heft and EU institutional weight. Italy provides a southern-flank perspective and Leonardo’s drone expertise. Poland contributes frontline urgency and the moral authority of a nation spending 4 per cent of GDP on defence. The UK — excluded from EU defence structures since Brexit — gains re-entry through a side door.
This coalition is both LEAP’s strength and its vulnerability. It is strong enough to set standards, but narrow enough to alienate. The EU’s remaining 22 member states were not at the table. Countries with specific neutrality or sovereignty concerns — Ireland, Austria, Malta, Hungary, Cyprus — each cite different reasons for standing apart from weapons cooperation. A programme designed by five risks being rejected by the rest. European defence integration cannot be built by a vanguard that the rearguard refuses to follow.
What Breaks Without LEAP
Strip away the institutional politics. The operational gap is real and widening.
Every month of inaction compounds the deficit. European air-defence systems were designed for a threat environment that no longer exists — one where targets were expensive, scarce, and identifiable. Today’s threat is cheap, abundant, and increasingly autonomous. Commercial drones modified with small warheads already penetrate airspace that billion-euro systems are meant to protect. Russian intelligence operations have probed European borders with small drones, testing detection and response capabilities. The results are not reassuring.
The default trajectory without LEAP — or something like it — leads to a continent that spends more on defence each year while becoming less able to defend its own airspace against the cheapest category of threat. The gap between expenditure and capability will widen until a catalysing event — a drone striking critical infrastructure in a NATO member state, perhaps — forces emergency procurement at panic prices.
Ukraine offers a preview. Its defenders improvised because they had no alternative. Europe’s defenders face a different version of the same problem: they have alternatives, and all of them are slow.
What LEAP Must Become
For LEAP to avoid the fate of its predecessors, three things must happen.
The E5 must impose a hard ceiling on unit costs. Not aspirational targets — contractual maximums. If an interceptor costs more than a defined multiple of the drone it destroys, it fails the programme’s own test. This means accepting systems that are ugly, semi-disposable, and beneath the dignity of a glossy defence-industry brochure. The political cost is real: defence ministers who commission unglamorous weapons invite criticism from domestic lobbies that profit from complexity. The operational cost of not doing so is higher.
The programme must establish a genuine absorption pathway for Ukrainian tacit knowledge — not as a press-conference partnership but as an embedded exchange. Ukrainian engineers who have spent three years learning which commercial microchips survive which jamming environments possess knowledge that no European defence laboratory has replicated. LEAP must bring that knowledge inside its industrial base, which means offering something in return: contracts, residency, intellectual-property protections. This is a transaction, not charity.
The E5 must build a clear integration bridge to EU and NATO frameworks. Operating outside Brussels gains speed but loses scale. LEAP’s systems will be operationally useless if they cannot plug into EDDI’s layered network, NATO’s command structures, and the national systems of nations not in the pact. The bridge does not require LEAP to submit to EU governance. It requires common technical standards agreed early — not retrofitted after five nations have already built five incompatible variants.
Each of these requirements has a cost. Cost ceilings alienate primes. Ukrainian integration raises security concerns. Standards-setting slows development. LEAP’s architects must choose which costs they will pay, knowing that refusing to pay any of them guarantees a programme that delivers prototypes but not capability.
FAQ: Key Questions Answered
Q: What is the LEAP drone defence programme? A: LEAP — Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms — is a five-nation agreement signed in February 2026 by France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK to jointly develop cheap air-defence weapons and autonomous drones, with the first project targeted for delivery by 2027.
Q: How much does European defence fragmentation actually cost? A: The European Commission estimates between €27.5 billion and €110 billion annually. About 80 per cent of defence spending runs through national procurement systems, with three-quarters of contracts going to domestic firms — meaning most “European” defence money never leaves home.
Q: Why can’t existing air-defence systems stop cheap drones? A: Current systems like IRIS-T and Patriot were designed to intercept expensive cruise missiles and aircraft. Using a missile costing tens of thousands of euros to destroy a drone costing hundreds creates an unsustainable cost ratio that attackers can exploit through sheer volume.
Q: Does LEAP compete with EU defence initiatives? A: LEAP sits outside EU institutional structures and includes the UK, a non-EU member. It runs parallel to the EU’s own Drone Defence Initiative, PESCO projects, and the European Sky Shield Initiative — raising questions about duplication, though its supporters argue the minilateral format trades institutional breadth for speed.
A Pact With Gravity
The history of European defence cooperation is a history of ambitions announced in capitals and diluted in committees. LEAP’s architects have studied that history and drawn a rational conclusion: work around the committees. Whether rational conclusions survive contact with five nations’ industrial lobbies, parliamentary cycles, and procurement cultures is the test that no signing ceremony can pass.
LEAP addresses a real gap with a plausible model. That makes it better than most of what has come before. It is not, however, proof against the forces that made it necessary — the same national reflexes that keep 80 per cent of defence spending inside domestic borders, the same industrial incentives that turn every cheap-weapon programme into an expensive one, the same institutional fragmentation that produces seven water mains under one street. The pact’s true enemy is not the drone. It is the gravitational pull of European defence as usual. In Kraków, five ministers declared their intention to resist that gravity. Gravity is patient.
Sources & Further Reading
- Europe’s main military powers to develop low-cost air-defence systems — Reuters reporting on the LEAP programme announcement and its industrial objectives
- European Drone Defence Programme Launched by Five Major Powers — Detailed coverage of LEAP’s structure, Ukrainian knowledge integration, and industrial aims
- PESCO at the Crossroads — Martens Centre analysis of EU defence cooperation mechanisms and their performance
- Böll EU Brief: Phalanx of defence pacts? — Heinrich Böll Foundation assessment of minilateral defence cooperation trends
- New plan to counter drone threats — European Commission — The EU’s own drone and counter-drone action plan published days before LEAP
- Europe’s counter-drone paradox — Defence industry analysis of the spending-capability disconnect in European C-UAS
- Towards an EU ‘defence union’? — Centre for European Reform on the structural barriers to European defence consolidation
- NATO Armaments Cooperation: The Case of the European Fighter — Historical study of cost escalation in multinational defence programmes
- European defence readiness roadmap 2030 — European Parliament briefing on the EU’s defence readiness targets and flagship initiatives
