A few hours before the inauguration of the Berlin ILA airshow, the German Chancellor unsurprisingly announced the end of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS). Launched by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in 2017, the program initially intended to prepare a Next Generation Fighter (NGF) aircraft, remote effectors, loyal unmanned wingmen (drones, as in unmanned combat air vehicles) and a secure digital architecture installing AI-based data fusion at the level of the (air) battlefield (the so-called “combat cloud”).
Estimated at 100 billion euros, FCAS phase 2 was frozen in December 2025, delaying the elaboration of specifications and demonstrators.
