BRIDGING THE DIVIDE : Assessing Technical and Informational Interoperability in Europe’s Next-Generation Air Combat Programmes

Abstract

Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in airpower hinges on whether its two sixth-generation initiatives, the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS) and the UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), can achieve genuine technical and informational interoperability.

This thesis asks which factors determine the actual level of interoperability reached across these parallel programmes and their associated systems. It builds an integrated theoretical framework by combining two-level games, historical institutionalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and communities-of-practice, and operationalises “interoperability maturity” through an eight-indicator IML scorecard applied to both programmes. Empirically, the study analyses a purposive corpus of official EU/NATO instruments, national gate-review documents, industry material and specialised reporting (2017–2025), complemented by four elite interviews with policy and industry practitioners, for a total of 168 documents.

Findings show a clear baseline of technical compatibility where legacy NATO standards and backward-compatibility requirements already exist (e.g., tactical datalinks and IFF), but uneven maturity in cloud-centric data exchange (semantics, schema governance, cross-domain security), mission-system openness (APIs/SDKs), and test/validation pipelines for manned–unmanned teaming. Informational interoperability lags when classification rules, export controls and fragmented governance inhibit timely, policy-compliant sharing, even when the underlying technology is available. Across cases, codified rules, repeat interaction and trusted practitioner networks correlate with higher maturity on adjacent technical indicators. By contrast, weak or voluntary institutional arrangements, or those permitting wide national derogations, sustain fragmentation.

The comparative analysis suggests that convergence is most likely when four mechanisms reinforce each other: reciprocal concessions that expand domestic win-sets; incremental “layering/conversion” of legacy rules toward common standards; credible, enforceable institutional designs that lower transaction costs and signal commitment; and transnational communities of practice that standardise de facto routines and feed them into formal annexes.

Policy implications include prioritising shared data-governance and security baselines for the “combat cloud,” hardening openness requirements in mission-system interfaces, and using EU/NATO instruments to lock practitioner standards into enforceable specifications.

Limitations stem from access constraints and a single-researcher design. Future researchers could extend the indicator set to operational/organizational dimensions and test generalisability beyond the air domain.