European defence officials are pushing back against EU attempts to cut reliance on US tech giants and warned the move could leave Europe with inferior systems, greater cyber risks and problems in co-ordinating with NATO allies, according to FT

The sovereignty versus interoperability tension has run through European procurement debates for years, and pushback from defence establishments has historically slowed or diluted Brussels-led initiatives when operational risk to NATO coordination is invoked. The split worth drawing is between sovereignty ambition as rhetoric and as funded policy: episodes of this kind tend to progress only where procurement rules and budget lines actually shift, and official-level resistance of this sort has on previous occasions confined such efforts to pilot programmes. The actors cut both ways, since the European defence names and the US primes with local footprints sit on opposite sides of any preference regime, and past attempts at European preference in strategic sectors have produced protracted negotiations rather than clean breaks. The follow-ons are whether this stays at official grumbling or surfaces in formal Council positions, and whether the cyber and interoperability objections translate into carve-outs in any forthcoming legislative text. As a report rather than a decision, the signal is that the political economy of de-risking from US tech is contested inside the bloc itself.