The European Defence Agency has announced that it will coordinate a Joint Ammunition Qualification programme funded with €50 million from the European Commission under the European Defence Industry Programme, focusing initially on 155 mm artillery ammunition. The figure is small beside the instruments around it. The Commission’s EDIP 2026–2027 work programme sets the maximum Union contribution for the Programme budget line at EUR 1 171 486 000. The Act in Support of Ammunition Production, whose overall EU allocation the Commission puts at around €500 million, gave about €248 million to powder and about €124 million to explosives, and about €2 million — roughly 0.4 per cent of the instrument, and a single Slovak project — to testing and reconditioning certification. Europe financed the production of shells and left the infrastructure that decides whether a shell can be accepted almost entirely to national budgets. That infrastructure is not adequately described by counting firing ranges, climatic chambers or electromagnetic facilities. Ammunition must be exposed to defined energetic, environmental and safety conditions; land platforms and their subsystems must survive mechanical, climatic and electromagnetic evaluation; mission electronics must generate evidence traceable to a controlled configuration and acceptable to the relevant authority. What matters is whether site, instrumentation, personnel, procedure, accreditation, security and data can be assembled when needed, and whether the evidence produced there can pass through national qualification and contractual acceptance without another authority requiring the work to be repeated. Whether €50 million moves that boundary is the open question.