In June 2025 Sweden’s Armed Forces joined NorthStar, the 5G innovation programme run by Telia and Ericsson, to test 5G Standalone technology for military use. A few weeks earlier Nokia and blackned, a German defence software company in which Rheinmetall then held 51 per cent, had signed a memorandum of understanding to build deployable tactical networks. The European Defence Fund had already set a maximum contribution of EUR 26,998,532.29 for 5G COMPAD, a three-year action to design, prototype and test a 5G-based defence communications architecture. The Commission describes its successor, 5G COMPAD 2.0, as a way to enable Member States to procure and evolve coalition capability with complementary civil communication networks and devices. Commercial cellular standards bring that industrial base into defence. With it come patents declared essential to the standards, which may be owned by companies other than the armed force and its prime contractor. Conformity with an ETSI standard confers no licence, and a patent holder’s undertaking to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms is not itself a licence. The Union’s new regulation on compulsory licensing for crisis management does not apply to defence-related products. The unresolved question is whether the companies that manufacture, integrate, operate and repair Europe’s military 5G systems hold rights covering the acts they must perform. It is also whether those rights survive a change of supplier, integrator, operator or configuration.