The boss of Airbus, Guillaume Faury, heads a group which is not content with being the world number one in civil aviation. It is also a key player in Europe in space and defense. Interview at a time when the war on the EU borders raises crucial questions in terms of European sovereignty.
After two years of war in Ukraine, what lessons have you learned from this conflict, for Airbus and more broadly the defense industry?
We have clearly entered a new cycle, where many things have started to change. Defense budgets, which had declined for forty years, are recovering, even if the budgetary equation is more difficult to resolve after the health crisis. Defense is regaining the place it should have kept to offer guarantees of sovereignty, independence and prosperity. We are no longer in exotic debates, at European level, about whether defense is “sustainable”. The facts impose themselves on us, with a close, powerful and aggressive country which puts at the center the need to be able to defend itself. We see large financial institutions discussing among themselves, but also private banks, to reverse the course of a disengagement which was an anomaly. It has once again become legitimate to finance the defense sector.
On March 5, the Commission encouraged the Twenty-Seven to invest and make joint purchases to reduce dependence on the United States and strengthen sovereignty. Are these initiatives credible and sufficient?
Europe must be recognized for its efforts to create a framework for more cooperation. What was presented goes in the right direction, and I hope that the countries will take advantage of it for joint projects. But there are budgetary constraints, a priority given to ammunition and artillery in the short term, and new battlefields (cyber, space, etc.) to integrate. Defense is the sole responsibility of States. Europe cannot decide for others. I add that the programs launched must succeed.
In fact, isn’t the Future Air Combat System (FCAS) threatened by competing projects?
It took considerable efforts to build the seven pillars of the SCAF (airplane, drones, engines, combat cloud, etc.), but it will not enter service until 2040. We must therefore continue to support the existing capabilities and the evolution of combat aircraft in service such as the Rafale or the Eurofighter. In doing so, funding for later phases of FCAS must continue to be protected, otherwise there will be a problem. Instead of building defense Europe, we would continue to fragment it, as we did with the Rafale, the Eurofighter and the Swedish Gripen. A time may come when new partners will join the SCAF [un projet franco-germano-espagnol]or the GCAP program [Royaume-Uni-Italie-Japon].
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