Method and the Three Firm Types
This article opens the series by setting out a method for reading EU defence-industrial law as a practical selection system rather than as abstract legal commentary. The central claim is that, in an increasingly institutionalised defence market, regulatory eligibility and demonstrable compliance shape access to demand and de-risking more directly than generic notions of “quality” or reputation. The series therefore treats the legal texts as a set of testable conditions: what qualifies, what excludes, what is conditional, and what the law leaves unspecified. It distinguishes firm-level requirements (such as establishment, executive management and control), project and product requirements (such as supply-chain composition and design authority), programme-level access rules (how specific instruments structure procurement and funding), and time-horizon constraints (where the texts allow transitional pathways and by when specific capabilities must exist). On this basis, it defines three primary regulatory firm types. The Sovereign Champion is the configuration that satisfies the core eligibility and procurability constraints without relying on fragile exceptions. The Dependent or High-Risk Firm is the configuration that fails one or more hard constraints and has no stable, text-supported route to remove them within the relevant horizon. The M&A Target is the configuration that can become compliant only where the legal instruments explicitly provide transitional mechanisms. The dossiers that follow apply this framework to EDIP, SAFE and STEP, translating their provisions into reusable criteria, clarifying the evidence required to demonstrate compliance, and building a coherent taxonomy that can later be converted into structured variables for company sheets and scoring.