Two Licences and a Qualification Threshold
How Mandatory General Transfer Licences Could Reorganise Intra-EU Defence Supply Chains
On 10 June 2026 the Council presidency and the European Parliament’s negotiators reached a provisional agreement on the directive amending Directives 2009/43/EC and 2009/81/EC, and on 17 June the Permanent Representatives Committee confirmed the compromise text and authorised the offer letter transmitting it to the Parliament. The text introduces two new mandatory general transfer licences: one for transfers where both the recipient and the supplier are undertakings certified under Article 9, and one for transfers taking place in the framework of a structured intra-EU industrial partnership. The figure against which those instruments have to be read is fifty-five, the number of certified undertakings the Commission counted across the Union in its 2016 evaluation of the transfers directive, fourteen of them in Germany and twelve in France, with half the Member States holding none. The Commission staff working document of 3 November 2025 supplies a second pair of magnitudes: a general transfer licence typically allows a transfer to be performed within one to three days, whereas the average time for authorities to process a simple individual transfer licence can be estimated at six to seven weeks. The structural constraint is that neither new licence displaces the originating Member State’s authority over downstream export, end-use conditions, customs control or safeguard action. Which undertakings will be able to enter the faster category at all is the question the compromise leaves open.
The first section sets the compromise against the Union’s defence-readiness agenda and against the recorded performance of the existing regime, working from the Joint White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030, the European Council conclusions of 6 March 2025, the Commission staff working document accompanying the Defence Readiness Omnibus, the Commission’s 2016 evaluation, the European Parliament’s implementation report and resolution of 2021 and the European Parliamentary Research Service implementation assessment of October 2020. The second reconstructs the legal mechanics: the unchanged floor of national competence in Directive 2009/43/EC, the two new licences and the exemptions that accompany them, and the passage from the Commission proposal COM(2025) 823 final/2 through the Council negotiating mandate to the compromise text. The third examines what certification has selected for under the original Article 9 and the Commission Recommendation of 11 January 2011, what the amended Article 9 changes, and what the Commission’s register of certified defence-related enterprises does and does not disclose. The fourth sets out the consequences for firms and for licensing authorities. This report does not enumerate the undertakings currently certified in any Member State, does not assess the commercial standing of any named company, and does not forecast whether or when the directive will be adopted. It describes the qualification test the text creates, and the conditions under which that test would reorganise nothing.