Europe’s rearmament has been financed faster than it has been built, and the public record reflects that order of events. Decisions, envelopes, award maxima and commitments are documented in detail, because they are administrative acts that must be published. The quantities that determine whether a munition, a sensor or an airframe section can actually be delivered are documented far more sparsely, because they are commercial and technical facts that no one is obliged to disclose: whether a plant has been commissioned, whether its product has been qualified for the customer who needs it, whether the resulting output is still uncommitted, whether a unit has been accepted. For a company weighing whether to enter a defence supply chain, that asymmetry is not a presentational problem but the substance of the decision. An announced budget does not say where a supplier is wanted. A bottleneck named in a policy document may already have been closed by an investment that needs no new entrant, or may remain open because the binding constraint was never capacity at all, but a process approval held by a company on another continent. Each of these states leaves a different documentary trace, and the traces rarely point in the same direction.