Sixth-generation fighter jet: over 4,000 engineers face being reassigned to other projects

The 30 June deadline coincides with the end of the UK financial year and the finalisation of the DIP (Defence Investment Plan), a document intended to authorise multi-year funding, but the text of which remains confidential, making it impossible for the partners (Italia and Japan) to assess in advance whether the funds will be confirmed.

Recently, Poland and India have expressed an interest in joining the GCAP as a “lifeline”. The Germany could join if the rift with France over the FCAS – the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System is currently at a standstill due to unresolved industrial disputes between Airbus Defence and Dassault – were to become definitive. Canada has been a formal observer since March 2026. Whatever happens, the potential involvement of new countries in the project would in any case entail a restructuring of the trilateral governance, with a reduction in Italia’s workshare and a possible loss of Leonardo’s technical leadership.

The Italian government has already set aside around €8.7 billion to fund the design and preliminary development phases. Any additional funding will require parliamentary approval, at a time when the country has not yet exited the excessive deficit procedure, and in which the government is negotiating with the European Commission to extend the National Escape Clause to energy expenditure. The war in the Middle East, with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, has disrupted global supplies of energy and raw materials, weakened growth prospects, and driven up energy prices and inflation. The European National Escape Clause, already in place for defence spending, could allow Italia to exclude funding for the GCAP from the deficit calculation.

Partner companies cannot keep specialist teams on indefinite standby: engineers working on sixth-generation systems (stealth, AI integration, directed energy) are scarce resources and are highly sought after by competing programmes (the US F-47, the Franco-German FCAS, and legacy Tempest contracts).

Hence the warning issued on 25 May by Herman Claesen, Chairman of Edgewing and Managing Director of the Future Combat Air Systems division within BAE Systems’ aerospace sector. He clarified that over 4,000 engineers currently employed by BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Leonardo on the programme could be redeployed to other projects if the long-term contract is not finalised by the deadline. Leonardo accounts for around 3,000 of the 9,000 staff involved in the programme (33% of the total workforce). According to indications emerging from checks carried out in the last few hours, it would appear that this scenario will ultimately be averted.

The GCAP project is a litmus test of the European defence industry’s ability to become less reliant on the US. Purely hypothetically, a deadlock in the project would highlight the failure of European cooperation on sixth-generation weapon systems. On the one hand, the FCAS, the project worth around €100 billion, is alreadyhanging in the balance: French manufacturer Dassault is claiming an 80% workshare on the engine system, contrary to the position of Germany’s MTU Aero Engines and France’s Safran). All this whilst the American F-47 programme is gathering pace with $5 billion earmarked in the US federal budget proposal for the 2027 financial year. The consequence would be an increased dependence of European defence on the US supply chain, starting with fifth-generation fighters, the F-35.

At NATO level, a slowdown in the GCAP could undermine the credibility of the ‘open’ industrial cooperation model that the Alliance has sought to promote with its Asian partners, particularly South Korea and Australia, as part of its Indo-Pacific security strategy.