Acquisition is routinely presented as the fastest available route to defence capacity. A qualified production line, an assembled systems-integration team or an earned customer approval each take years to create and, on the face of it, months to buy. The reasoning is sound as far as it goes. What it tends to omit is that a purchase agreement transfers legal title to a company, while the usefulness of that company to a defence customer rests on a quite different set of things: permissions that are granted to particular legal persons, clearances attached to named individuals, data held under licence from third parties, approvals issued by customers rather than by owners, and programme eligibility that is assessed afresh whenever control changes. These can move with the shares, move separately, or not move at all. A factory can stay intact while a supply agreement reserves much of its output to the former owner. Engineers can transfer under employment law while losing the clearances that made them useful. A company can remain the same contractual counterparty and still become ineligible for the grant that funds its development work. The question that follows is narrower and more demanding than the one usually asked in acquisition analysis, and it is the question pursued here: what does a buyer of a European defence supplier actually acquire, and under what documented conditions does the transaction preserve the industrial value that European readiness depends on?