European rearmament is usually discussed in terms of prime contractors, national budgets and headline programmes, but the ability to field and sustain equipment also depends on companies several tiers below the platform level, whose products are small, specialised and difficult to observe from outside. Precision mechatronics is one such layer. Mirrors that hold a laser beam steady against atmospheric turbulence, stages that shift an infrared image by fractions of a pixel, and actuators that must survive launch vibration and then move by micrometres in orbit are specialised products, and a defence customer that depends on the company making them may discover the dependency only when it tries to replace the supplier. CEDRAT Technologies, a company with its registered office in Meylan, in France, is a useful test case because it appears in two contemporary European programmes at once: it coordinates a research project financed by the European Defence Fund and it is named as the supplier of pointing mechanisms for a secure optical-communications demonstrator funded under France 2030. The public record about the company is unusually rich on what it designs, builds and tests, and unusually thin on who owns it, which of its products have been qualified and accepted for defence use, how much it can produce and who supplies its critical inputs. The question that follows is precise: what does the public record establish about CEDRAT’s industrial and programme roles, and does it support describing the company as a European defence dependency, that is, a supplier whose loss or replacement would impose a material cost or delay on European defence capability?