Signal No. 92 · Crews in August
NAVPLB Poland signs about SEK 47 billion for three Saab A26 submarines — and a bilateral Baltic Sea Pact with Sweden
Saab, 29 Jun · Reuters, 29 Jun · Government.se, 29 Jun · Großwald: Orka offset deadlock
Poland's State Treasury Armaments Agency (Agencja Uzbrojenia) signed a contract with Saab in Gdynia on Monday for three A26-class submarines, valued at about SEK 47 billion (roughly EUR 4.3 billion). The prime ministers and defence ministers of both states attended. Saab said deliveries run continuously to completion in 2038, and that the contract carries a weapon package and a training and support package. The boats end a programme — Orka — that Warsaw has run, restarted and stalled for more than a decade.
The terms around the boats matter as much as the boats. Saab committed to building maintenance, repair and overhaul capability inside Poland with Polish industry. The Swedish government and Polish reporting describe a joint venture between Saab and PGZ (Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, the Polish state defence group) covering submarine servicing, underwater drones and heavy torpedoes, alongside a defined technology transfer. Sweden, in return, will buy the Ratownik rescue ship from PGZ's Gdynia yard. To cover the years before the first hull arrives, Poland will operate the Swedish boat HMS Södermanland on lease, with Polish crew training starting in August and Polish participation in Sweden's sea trials of its own first A26 boats, HMS Blekinge and HMS Skåne. That industrial package — the Ratownik offset and the PGZ work-share — is the same dispute that held the signature up to a Polish end-June ultimatum; resolving it is what let Monday happen.
The deal sat inside a wider summit. Sweden and Poland used the intergovernmental consultations to launch the Baltic Sea Pact, a deepened bilateral security and defence cooperation. It rests on three pillars — security and defence policy, military cooperation, and defence-industry cooperation — with the stated aim of constraining Russia in the Baltic, jointly as NATO allies. The submarines are its first hard deliverable. One fact cuts against the easy reading: the A26 is not yet in the water for anyone — Sweden's own first boats are not due in service until 2027–2028, so Poland is the export launch customer of a class with no operational record.
Signal › The offset fight that stalled this signature became its architecture. Poland did not simply buy three submarines; it bought a servicing-and-torpedo joint venture, a technology transfer, a leased boat to cover the gap and a bilateral pact, and sold Sweden a rescue ship on the way out. Großwald Curated No. 44 read the week's procurement as a proof premium — states paying for combat-proven hardware over sovereign promise. Gdynia complicates that read rather than confirming it: the A26 is unproven, Sweden's own boats are not yet at sea, and Warsaw bought it anyway, retiring the risk with the lease and a seat at Sweden's trials instead of with a service record. What Poland would not yield on was participation, not proof. And for Poland to wire its undersea deterrence straight to Sweden — under the alliance rather than through Brussels — extends the lattice of bilateral defence treaties Poland has spent the spring making itself the hub of.
DINDPL The EIB writes its largest-ever corporate loan — EUR 3 billion for Airbus, with a 25-project defence pipeline behind it
EIB, 29 Jun · Reuters, 29 Jun · Handelsblatt, 29 Jun
The European Investment Bank and Airbus signed a first EUR 1 billion tranche in Brussels on Monday, the opening draw on a EUR 3 billion envelope the bank calls its largest corporate loan ever authorised. The money backs Airbus research and development through 2030 in advanced technologies and integrated systems — for commercial aviation and, the bank states, for security and defence systems — with the projects sited in France, Germany and Spain. The financing sits under the EIB's TechEU programme, and the bank flags Airbus as Europe's largest defence company. EIB President Nadia Calviño said the operation was approved in roughly six months and insisted it was a normal loan on normal terms, not a subsidy. The structuring matters: cast as research-and-development credit rather than the "launch aid" that once underwrote new Airbus jets, it supports the airframer without reopening the Airbus–Boeing subsidy truce at the WTO.
What sits behind the headline number is the larger shift. In interviews accompanying the signing, Calviño said the EIB now runs a pipeline of about 25 defence projects and has met its target of routing five per cent of its EU lending to security and defence. It has also signed framework agreements with commercial banks — Deutsche Bank, Santander, Erste, Piraeus, Banque Populaire — that let it reach down to firms active in weapons and munitions. A separate billion-euro loan funds military barracks in Lithuania. For most of its history the bank avoided anything close to arms production.
Signal › The dual-use envelope is how the EIB's old wall against financing anything that fires a shot comes down without being formally demolished — commercial aviation and "security and defence systems" travel inside one record loan, and the defence half rides in on the commercial half's legitimacy. But the Airbus loan is now the flagship of a threshold already crossed, not the frontier: a 25-project pipeline, a five per cent target met, and bank-intermediated capital reaching down to ammunition makers describe an institution that has changed what it is for. The question Curated No. 44 posed — who pays to turn Europe's rearmament announcements into industrial capacity — keeps resolving toward EU public institutions, provided the paperwork reads dual-use.
DINDPL Britain's nine-month defence-plan delay is folding its own suppliers — the Investment Plan lands Tuesday, billions below the chiefs' GBP 28 billion ask
Reuters, 29 Jun · Reuters, 28 Jun · FT, 29 Jun · The News, 29 Jun
Britain's nine-month delay in setting out its defence spending plans has begun to break its supplier base, Reuters reported on Monday. Small firms have collapsed — the trainer-jet start-up Aeralis entered administration in May — while others have frozen investment or moved abroad. The defence group Cohort says its UK revenue share has fallen from about 80 per cent a few years ago to under half, with demand instead coming from Germany, Poland, the Nordics and the Baltics. One of its units has set up a torpedo-launcher facility in Canada, and the wiring-automation firm Q5D is siting a new factory in the United States because its sales are there. The defence industry body ADS reports dozens of companies shutting their defence units.
The cause is institutional. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to publish the Defence Investment Plan on Tuesday, among his final acts before he steps down in July. Defence chiefs put the funding needed to restore Britain's capabilities at about GBP 28 billion. The plan is expected to provide far less — around GBP 14.5 billion, after Jarvis won roughly GBP 1 billion more than the GBP 13.5 billion first offered to Healey. That gap is what the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence have fought over for months. John Healey resigned as defence secretary over the plan's resourcing; his successor Dan Jarvis has refocused it on near-term kit such as commando boats and strike drones. On Sunday the ministry confirmed the plan scraps the Type 83 destroyer in favour of at least six British-built "Common Combat Vessels" that act as control hubs for uncrewed systems. The one part of the base that has moved at speed is the work done for Ukraine — including a GBP 45 million long-range strike weapon taken from concept to tested prototype inside months.
Signal › This is the Conversion Gap at the institutional level: Britain's constraint is not money, threat awareness or industrial talent but the machinery — Treasury–MoD trust — to turn intent into contracts. While the two departments deadlocked, the demand signal migrated to Germany, Poland, the Nordics and the United States, and the supplier base London will shortly ask to rearm the country has spent nine months hollowing out. A plan published the week the prime minister leaves office inherits the same unresolved split that produced the delay; the Treasury select committee, as its own chair notes, reached the same finding 16 years ago. Poland signed and localised an industry in a single Gdynia morning; Britain is still arguing over the bill.
AIDIN Germany moves to sole-source a sovereign drone-swarm 'mission system' to Helsing — over EUR 220 million, the rights kept national
hartpunkt, 29 Jun · suv.report, 13 Nov 2025 · Shephard, 1 Sep 2023 · Großwald Signal No. 82 · Axios, 9 Jun
The Bundeswehr is set to award the AI firm Helsing a research-and-technology project worth more than EUR 220 million gross to build a "mission system" letting uncrewed combat aircraft and Remote Carriers network and operate together, Hartpunkt reported on Monday. The system — the Combat Fighter System of Systems Nucleus (CFSN) — is to be an open reference architecture that different manufacturers' drones plug into, with MBDA Deutschland's RCM² (a multi-domain, multi-role missile-drone hybrid) named as a test effector. A so-called 25-million-euro submission — the threshold above which the Bundestag's budget committee must approve a procurement — is expected before the summer recess, and other German firms are to join the work. BMVg, the German defence ministry, and Helsing both declined to comment.
The project grew out of Germany's national share of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) — areas the trilateral programme did not cover, funded nationally. Helsing is not new to that work. It has led the AI "backbone" of Germany's national FCAS effort since a 2023 award to a consortium with Rohde & Schwarz and IBM — part of why a market survey now finds it the only qualified German bidder. CFSN — which German specialist outlets have tracked since last year — is the framework now succeeding the trilateral programme's national share. It is meant to survive the Franco-German decision to abandon a joint fighter and its Next Generation Weapon System (NGWS), while remaining integrable into any future FCAS combat cloud should one materialise. Ownership of the CFSN is to stay with the German state, with Helsing acting as the developer rather than the proprietor. The specific terms — the figure, the direct award and the parliamentary submission — rest on Hartpunkt's reporting alone.
Signal › FCAS's fighter core collapsed in June; its combat-cloud and drone layers survived under the name (Signal No. 82). CFSN is Germany taking national ownership of exactly those layers — the software that makes drones, loyal wingmen and cruise-effectors fight as one — and keeping the rights rather than renting them from a prime. Berlin is buying the build sole-source from a company hardened on Ukraine's front. At the US-run Flytrap 5 exercise in Lithuania in May, Helsing says, its HX-2 attack drone hit on 15 of 17 flights under electronic-warfare jamming — the kind of proof no specification buys. The open architecture is also a procurement lever: rival drones that must plug into one government-owned standard become comparable and swappable, which is how a buyer keeps an AI software house from becoming the next lock-in.
Forward Look · Week Ahead
Tomorrow, 30 June — two plans come due. Britain publishes its Defence Investment Plan, and the full GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme) design contract for the UK–Italy–Japan sixth-generation fighter is expected to sign before the GBP 686 million Edgewing bridge contract expires that day (Janes, 13 Jun). With FCAS broken into national tracks, GCAP is Europe's only live sixth-gen programme — whether it signs on schedule is the test of whether developmental megaprogrammes still close.
Wednesday, 1 July — Berlin's defence cabinet. Chancellor Merz convenes the cabinet at the defence ministry, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte attending, to adopt Defence Minister Pistorius's reserve law (Handelsblatt, 28 Jun). It aims to grow the Bundeswehr reserve from about 60,000 to 200,000 by 2035 and would end the "double voluntariness" that lets an employer block a call-up. That is the manpower side of German rearmament — a measure of how far Berlin will compel what it has so far only asked for.
Mid-July — KNDS lists. The Leopard and Caesar maker aims for a Frankfurt–Paris dual listing by a hard deadline of 13 July, current shareholders selling up to 20 per cent, at a valuation now guided to EUR 12–15 billion, down from the EUR 25 billion once mooted (CNBC, 24 Jun). The first read on whether the market's proof discipline reaches a state-controlled incumbent with a EUR 33 billion order book.
7–8 July, Ankara — NATO summit. President Erdoğan used the run-up to press allies to lift defence-trade restrictions on Turkey and bring Ankara into European defence initiatives, as Turkey locks the capital down with a 70,000-strong security force and denies accreditation to critical media (Reuters, 29 Jun). The Defence Industry Forum runs 7 July; the agenda is the five per cent-of-GDP pathway and how the money turns into production.
15 July — EU 21st sanctions deadline. The package would hit close to 90 Russian banks and 170-plus entities and carries the bloc's first fisheries measures; Bulgaria is blocking parts over the listing of Patriarch Kirill and its Lukoil and energy exposure, and unanimity gives its objection the whole package (Euronews, 26 Jun). Separately, at Friday's energy council, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania pressed the Commission to bring forward its stalled ban on Russian oil imports — a different instrument from the rolling package. It was shelved in the spring over an Iran-war supply crunch that never came, and energy commissioner Jørgensen stayed non-committal (FT, 27 Jun).
Watch: Russian fuel. Shortages spread on Monday from annexed Crimea across southern Russia and into Moscow itself, with rationing now nationwide and Sevastopol petrol near triple its normal price; President Putin gave his first public admission that Ukraine's strikes are "creating problems" (Reuters, 29 Jun). Ukraine's deep-strike campaign is, for now, doing to Russian export revenue what the EU's own sanctions and shadow-fleet enforcement have not — a demand-side squeeze arriving faster than any package Brussels can pass.
Also watch: the Baltic. Surveillance imagery published Monday by an international consortium, from an Estonian border-guard flight in May, shows Russia's only LNG regasification tanker carrying two sandbagged 12.7mm Kord machine-gun positions on its bridge wings (OCCRP, 29 Jun). The vessel — Gazprom's Marshal Vasilevskiy, which supplies gas to Kaliningrad — has carried roughly 50 "passengers" since August, some presenting military identification and one registering an FSB address. This is not a shadow-fleet ship: it is Russian-flagged, state-owned and unsanctioned, running between Russian ports. What it shows is a state energy lifeline armed as a boarding deterrent — analysts dispute whether the Kord is much use against drones — even as Europe's own navies grow readier to board the ships they suspect.
