Fighting through Lost Links
What Europe’s prize-based test regime can and cannot prove about autonomy under degraded links
On 14 July 2026 the European Commission, the European Defence Agency and Ukraine’s Minister of Defence announced in Kyiv six winners of the first BraveTech EU Phase I and confirmed that EDA would take them into operational experimentation in Portugal. The Agency holds €35 million for that phase, running until the end of 2028. The figure sits inside a programme whose total budget is €100 million across two phases named Seed and Scale Up, and above a selection layer in which each winning team received a €120,000 prize. Between those magnitudes lies the structural constraint: a coordination and support action can buy evidence, but it cannot buy adoption, because the authorities that acquire capability are not the authorities that generate the test data. The unresolved question is therefore not which of the six firms performs best in Portugal. It is whether a prize-based experimentation regime can produce evidence about degraded tactical connectivity in a form that procurement, certification and integration authorities are able to use at all, and what would show that it has failed to do so.
This report proceeds in four parts. The first reconstructs the institutional architecture, working from the EDA–Commission contribution agreement of 29 April 2026, the Action Plan on Autonomous Systems, the HEDI framework and NATO’s Rapid Adoption Action Plan. The second examines legal form, budget and programme mechanics through the 2025 European Defence Fund work programme, the Sentinel Strike Challenge rules, the DefTech Forges eligibility conditions and the spectrum standards underlying one entrant’s architecture. The third examines the six firms through the awarding authority’s descriptions, their own public technical material and the commercial registers of France, Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Germany. The fourth sets out what the campaign can and cannot support. The report does not value these companies, assess their creditworthiness, forecast the outcome of the Portuguese trials or express any view on the merits of investing in them.