European rearmament has produced a large and durable flow of sustainment spending, and with it a widespread assumption that the flow is contestable. The reasoning is intuitive. If a government is spending hundreds of millions a year keeping an aircraft or a vehicle fleet serviceable, and if that money goes largely on labour, parts handling, workshop capacity, records management and training delivered close to where the equipment sits, then a competent European industrial firm ought to be able to win a share of it. Support spending also has the qualities that investors and corporate planners prize and that acquisition spending lacks: it recurs annually for as long as the fleet is in service, it is comparatively insensitive to the political cycle because the equipment has already been bought, and it is contracted in periods measured in years rather than in single deliveries. Sustainment therefore looks like the accessible end of the defence market, the part that does not require designing a platform, financing a production line or defeating an incumbent prime contractor in open competition. It is also where governments say most explicitly that they want local employment, local repair capacity and shorter supply lines, so the stated policy objective and the commercial opportunity appear to point in the same direction.