When Jim Currier describes what European defence customers now demand from Honeywell Aerospace, the message is consistent: ITAR-free or don't apply. ITAR — the International Traffic in Arms Regulations — are US export control rules that give Washington the right to restrict, condition, or revoke technology transfers to foreign governments, even for equipment those governments have already paid for. European defence ministries have concluded they cannot build a credible, strategically autonomous defence industry on a foundation the US can switch off.
Currier's response was concrete. Honeywell acquired Civitanavi Systems, an Italian navigation technology company, and built out its European engineering base to around 1,000 staff, co-developing and holding intellectual property inside the EU specifically to qualify for the new generation of ITAR-free procurement contracts. The word he used for why this was necessary was a "prerequisite."
This is no longer about individual company strategy. The EU's funding architecture now codifies it. The European Defence Fund 2026 explicitly uses ITAR-free status as a criterion in funding assessments — projects relying on US-controlled technology components face a lower probability of support. The ReArm Europe programme — the €800 billion collective European defence spending commitment, including €1.5 billion to strengthen Europe's defence industrial base between 2025 and 2027 — lists ITAR-free capability development as a stated priority.
The EU is also moving to embed "European preference" into the Defence Procurement Directive, which has drawn sharp pushback from Washington. The US government warned that if implemented, it would likely review blanket waivers under reciprocal defence procurement agreements with 19 EU member states. The tension is real: Europe wants ITAR independence and the US still expects access to European defence budgets.
The case for ITAR-free procurement has been building from multiple directions. The Kiel Institute's Sparta 2.0 analysis found that Europe can close ten critical military capability gaps with the US for roughly €500 billion over a decade — but doing so requires building an entirely new family of long-range and hypersonic weapons from scratch, deliberately free from American export controls. A paper by five German defence analysts published in Defense News in May 2026 concluded that European military autonomy is achievable for around €50 billion per year over ten years — a figure large in absolute terms but dwarfed by the combined defence spending growth already committed under NATO's new 5% GDP target.
The OSW Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw added a further dimension: US military capacity is increasingly strained, with 35 ageing supply and tanker ships constraining simultaneous Naval operations, and F-35 production running at only 66% of planned rates. Europe cannot simply rely on US fill-in capacity in a crisis even if the political will were there.
Europe's shift toward ITAR-free procurement is rational, not symbolic. It is a direct response to a changed risk calculation: that US export controls, in a moment of transatlantic friction, could become a political lever applied against European governments. The signals have been there — in the conditional posture of the Trump administration toward NATO, in the Greenland dispute, in the broader pattern of treating alliance relationships as transactional. European defence ministries have read those signals and are building accordingly.
For European industry, this is an opportunity — a chance to build sovereign capability in sectors where dependence on US supply chains had become structural. For Washington, it is a long-term strategic own goal: the ITAR rules designed to maintain American influence over allied defence are now accelerating the construction of a European defence industry that will, over time, need Washington less. ITAR-free is not just a procurement category. It is the architecture of a more independent European security posture.
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