Drone autonomy The ITAR Problem Nobody in European Defence is Talking About

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Why the ITAR problem matters for every NATO drone program.

Europe is spending €739 billion (approx. 847 billion USD) a year to build its strategic autonomy. However, most of the critical components inside its drone fleet are still subject to U.S. export laws. In a conflict, this creates an operational bottleneck: Europe cannot freely deploy, modify, or share its own weapons without a formal sign-off from Washington.

When the British Defence Secretary's aircraft was GPS-jammed over NATO's eastern flank on May 21, his pilots were forced to navigate entirely on backup inertial systems. Suspected Russian jamming disabled the satellite signal shortly after the aircraft departed Estonia, causing navigation interference to spike to 20 times its baseline. It was a vivid illustration of a vulnerability European militaries have been warning about for years. European militaries are now pivoting toward optical laser targeting precisely because it works when GPS fails. Yet, inside almost every European drone program, these exact laser systems are legally controlled under U.S. export law.

Europe is spending on defence at a pace not seen since the 1950s. €739 billion in 2025, growing 14% year-on-year, and the capital targets autonomous systems, driven by newly established frameworks like the European Drone Defence Initiative and the Eastern Flank Watch. To ensure that this investment builds genuine domestic capacity, the EU implemented the SAFE mandate. This mandate requires that any EU-funded defence procurement program contain a minimum of 65% European-origin components.

European procurement teams think they are avoiding foreign dependencies by buying from European defence contractors. What they don’t realise is that a U.S. framework called ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, still controls those platforms from the inside out because they are packed with American components. Under these rules, if a European-made drone contains even a single U.S.-sourced chip or sensor, the entire system is legally subject to American export jurisdiction. The result is a profound operational contradiction: Europe pays for the hardware, but the U.S. State Department retains the final say over where and how it can be deployed in a crisis.

This matters because, according to data published by the European Parliament, up to 60% of the subsystems inside European-assembled drones currently originate from outside the bloc, primarily the United States and China. Set that against the SAFE mandate's 65% European-origin requirement, and the result is an arithmetic deadlock: procurement teams are writing regulatory requirements they cannot yet fulfill, because a sovereign, commercial-scale industrial base does not exist for the components that matter most.

This is not a theoretical risk sitting somewhere in the fine print of defence contracts; we have already seen what it looks like in practice. In 2023, SpaceX restricted Ukrainian forces from using Starlink for drone guidance over Crimea. This was not because of a treaty obligation or a decision by any elected government, but because of the risk of reclassification under U.S. export controls.

That is the same legal logic now embedded inside the majority of European NATO drone programs. The United States is a reliable ally, but reliability is not predictability. Europe should not need permission from Washington to decide where, and for what, its own defence systems are used. That legal dependency, sitting at the core of European defence infrastructure, is a structural problem European procurement has not yet confronted directly.

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European procurement frameworks are beginning to read that signal. ReArm Europe and the European Defence Industry Program have formally codified ITAR-free status as a funding criterion, not as a political statement or an ideological shift away from transatlantic allies, but as a clinical acknowledgment of operational risk. A Kiel Institute analysis estimates that genuine European military independence is achievable for roughly €500 billion (approx. 573 billion USD) over the next decade, but only if the foundational systems are built free of external export controls.

As an engineer who has spent years designing hardware within this ecosystem, I know that building ITAR-free is not a marketing position; it requires rethinking the engineering architecture from the ground up, deliberately sourcing or manufacturing every lens, sensor, and circuit board within European borders. Until very recently, that was simply not possible for certain high-consequence components, including the lightweight laser-targeting payloads that give tactical drones the precision to operate effectively when GPS is unavailable and visibility is near zero.

Until June 2026, no European sovereign supplier of laser targeting payloads existed at commercial scale, meaning the component that determines whether a drone can hit its target was, by definition, ITAR-controlled, regardless of how European the rest of the platform appeared on paper.

The right question is not whether a system is European-assembled; it is whether every operationally critical component inside that system is free of U.S. export jurisdiction before the ink dries. We built our systems ITAR-free on purpose, because the operational commanders who asked us to build it said they could not afford to wait for State Department approval when a crisis unfolded. That request told us everything we needed to know about the gap between European defence ambition and European procurement practice. If Europe is going to invest hundreds of billions to secure its borders, the tools it buys must belong entirely to the nations relying on them to fight.