On 30 October 2025 the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation awarded a contract worth, on the contractor’s account, over €450 million for the Wide Wet Gap Crossing programme, under which Germany and the United Kingdom will replace the M3 amphibious bridging system they have operated together for a generation. The British share is about £200 million for 36 vehicles. Set against the objects that must cross, the sum is small: it buys the successor to a fleet that a single multinational battalion of some 900 personnel operates across nine companies, and it buys it against a French inventory that has fallen from more than 3,000 metres of floating bridging in the 1990s to roughly 500 metres today. European rearmament is increasing the mass, range and density of land forces that must be moved across a battlespace in which rivers, canals, damaged infrastructure and dry gaps can interrupt manoeuvre as effectively as shortages of combat vehicles. The relevant constraint is not the nominal amount of bridging equipment European armies hold. It is whether bridge vehicles, floating modules and support bridges can be converted, at the required place and time, into independent crossing packages with reconnaissance, trained crews, transport, propulsion, anchoring, command, technical documentation, maintenance, spares and sufficient redundancy to keep more than one divisional axis moving. Whether Europe can perform that conversion at the tempo a corps requires is the question the public record has not been asked to answer.
This report examines the conversion problem in six European armies and one industrial base. It sets out an analytical test of concurrent heavy crossing and the four technical layers the test must keep apart; it reads the German and British case against the Bundeswehr’s record of Pionierbrückenbataillon 130, the OCCAR contract award and the Bundestag budget committee’s approval of the German tranche; it reads the French and Polish cases against the National Assembly’s information report no. 2467, the DGA’s SYFRALL order and the National Appeals Chamber’s judgment KIO 1206/22; it reads the Swedish and Dutch cases against FMV’s contract and receipt records, the Defence Projects Overview of May 2026 and the Netherlands Court of Audit’s 2025 accountability report; and it examines industrial concentration, reconnaissance, propulsion, maintenance and personnel as constraints that bind across every programme. It closes on financing, reading Council Regulation (EU) 2025/1106 for what its eligibility conditions do and do not require of land-support equipment. This report does not assess classified readiness data, does not rank the six armies against one another, and does not claim to establish what any of them could do on operations; it establishes only what the public record demonstrates, and where it stops.