European rearmament has financed a great deal of industrial capacity and disclosed remarkably little about how a new supplier joins the chain that capacity belongs to. Public instruments are built around the cost of creating productive assets, and they report on that basis, naming recipients, ceilings and expected output. What they do not and cannot settle is the step that determines whether an additional tonne, component or service actually reaches an armed force. That step is qualification: the acceptance of a specific product, made by a specific supplier on a specific process, for use on a specific programme by the authority entitled to approve it. Qualification is distinct from certification, which attests that a management system or a process conforms to a standard and can in principle be recognised across borders. It is distinct again from a framework agreement, which establishes the terms on which business may later be placed, and from a purchase order, which commits volume. Because qualification is governed by contracts, drawings, process specifications and acceptance authorities rather than by published instruments, the European market now presents an unusual asymmetry: the demand is loud and the entry conditions are quiet. An analyst reading the public record can establish with precision how much money has been committed and how much output is expected, and will rarely be able to establish whether any of that output is contestable, or whether it was reserved in advance by firms qualified before the money arrived. The question that asymmetry raises is narrower and more useful than asking where Europe is short of capacity. It is this: at which points in the European defence industrial chain does the public record show, together, an unresolved constraint, an identifiable buyer and a route by which a new supplier could be accepted — and at which points does it show only one or two of the three?