Abstract
Although the share of European armaments produced collaboratively climbed steadily for five decades after 1949, it has remained flat at roughly a fifth of procurement for the past two decades, even as European states built ever more robust institutions: the European Defence Agency (2004) and the 2009 Defence and Security Procurement Directive. Beneath the aggregate figures lies a bifurcated reality: collaboration dominates some sectors, such as missiles and aircraft, while it has failed entirely to make inroads into others, such as armoured vehicles and warships. This paper advances a structural theory to explain why efforts to collaborate generate distinct outcomes in different sectors. Drawing on the management literature on joint ventures, it distinguishes the structural conditions that incentivise firms to cooperate from those that prevent them, arguing that sectors differ in their degree of “rivalness”. Collaboration is simplest when partner firms together occupy one market but otherwise operate in separate ones, since even a firm that loses relative capability to its partner can still gain by applying the shared knowledge to its other products; it is hardest when potential partners are rivals across their other product lines, leaving little room for win-win workshare compromises. It is thus a sector's structure that determines whether collaboration succeeds.
Panel: Session III
Joint Policy Workshop 2019 programme
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-JPW2019-collaborative-arms-procurement,
author = {Marc De Vore},
title = {Collaborative Arms Procurement},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/JPW2019-collaborative-arms-procurement.html}
}