European defence partnerships are now asked to do several things at once. They are expected to make cross-border technology acceptable to a national customer, to establish production inside Europe, to mobilise capital and skilled labour, to shorten delivery schedules, to preserve access to future upgrades, and to distribute economic activity among governments and companies whose objectives do not always coincide. The corporate form chosen for the relationship is therefore only the visible part of the arrangement, and often the least informative part. A 51:49 joint venture can leave the minority shareholder in control of indispensable technology. A domestic factory can depend on foreign design authority. A locally incorporated company can own assets without holding the rights needed to modify them. A partner that contributes little intellectual property can nevertheless capture substantial value through integration, components, programme management and customer access. For European rearmament the relevant question is not whether production has been localised in some general sense, but which capabilities, rights, liabilities and revenue streams have actually moved into the European industrial perimeter, and whether they remain usable if the partnership changes. That question has an awkward corollary, and it is where most published assessments of defence partnerships fail: before asking what a joint venture controls, one has to establish that the joint venture exists. Three arrangements announced over the past two years make it possible to test both questions against documents rather than intentions, and they turn out to occupy three different evidential positions rather than three comparable corporate structures.