Europe’s adoption of unmanned ground vehicles, low-cost drone interceptors and mass-produced strike weapons is usually described as a technological transition. The more consequential change is industrial and financial. Systems designed to be inexpensive, software-defined and modified at short intervals impose a different relationship between procurement, manufacturing, working capital, intellectual property and military assurance from the one associated with stable, long-cycle platforms. A vehicle that removes soldiers from a dangerous resupply route, an interceptor whose design changes every few weeks or a strike weapon intended for volume production contributes to sustained readiness only if the purchaser can keep ordering it, the producer can finance and replenish its inputs, each modified configuration can still be accepted, and European users retain enough rights and industrial access to support and adapt the equipment. The question that matters for European rearmament is therefore not whether Europe can buy or demonstrate autonomous systems, but whether it can reproduce useful military output through repeated cycles of procurement, production, modification, qualification, delivery and replacement, and what kind of finance and contract that requires.