In May 2025 Nokia and blackned, a German defence software company majority-owned by Rheinmetall, signed a memorandum of understanding to create deployable tactical networks built on Nokia’s 5G technology and tailored to Germany’s defence needs. Five months later Rheinmetall booked a Bundeswehr contract worth around €61 million gross to modernise the German Army’s combat training centre, and the work includes a new broadband radio infrastructure using 5G technology. Both events belong to a wider movement in which commercial cellular standards are being tested by European armed forces, developed with funding from the European Defence Fund and, in at least one disclosed case, contracted for by a European armed force. The standards on which 4G and 5G equipment rests are developed in common, and the patents that are essential to them belong to their individual owners, who under the ETSI regime undertake to license them on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms; the undertaking is not itself a licence to any particular user. A military communications system that uses those standards therefore depends not only on radios, software and integration capacity, but also on a chain of rights whose holders, scope and duration are set by private contracts. Absent an act of the state, those contracts determine whether equipment can lawfully be made, operated, repaired, modified and replaced over a service life that may outlast many of the suppliers, owners and configurations involved at the outset. The question is whether Europe’s legal instruments and its documented programmes show who holds those rights, and what happens to them when the industrial chain changes.