On 29 August, the German and French governments agreed to cooperate on a shared missile early-warning system within the framework of the Defense and Security Union.
The system will follow a traditional architecture and comprise ground-based and space-based elements. The ground component will consist of over-the-horizon radars, massive installations capable of detecting ballistic missiles at ranges of thousands of kilometers. russia's Voronezh series is the best known, not least because Ukrainian forces were the first to successfully strike them.
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The space component will be a satellite constellation. According to the German defense outlet Hartpunkt, it will be built around the ODIN'S EYE project, developed under the TWISTER initiative. The constellation will use satellites equipped with infrared sensors to detect launches and track the trajectories of ballistic and hypersonic missiles. A comparable network is being deployed by the United States under the Resilient Missile Warning Tracking Epoch program.
As Defense Express notes, an early-warning system is the cornerstone of missile defense. Its primary functions are to detect threats, trigger countermeasures (for Germany this would be Israel's Arrow-3), and provide alerts to the civilian population.
ODIN'S EYE, though evocative, is a constructed acronym for Multinational Development Initiative for a Space-Based Missile Early-Warning Architecture. The project began in 2021 as an EU-funded exploratory study with an initial €7.5 million budget. In 2023 the EU launched a three-year research program worth €90 million, excluding additional national contributions. The work involves 38 companies across 14 countries, including Thales Alenia Space, ArianeGroup and Leonardo, led by Germany's OHB System AG.
However, caution is warranted given the troubled record of previous Franco-German defense projects. The Main Ground Combat System (MGCS), the next-generation tank program, has advanced so slowly that forming the development consortium alone took six and a half years. During that period, Germany and 11 other countries launched a separate tank program without France.
The same applies to the delayed Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a sixth-generation fighter program whose progress has been undermined by competing national industrial priorities. This track record suggests any new Franco-German initiative should be judged by practical results rather than political declarations.
It is also possible the missile early-warning effort will focus less on joint development and more on information-sharing among national assets within a common European framework.
Over-the-horizon radars, for example, will need to be sited closer to russian territory to maximize coverage and enable earlier detection. For this reason, the project is more likely to proceed as a tightly coordinated EU cooperation effort than as a fully integrated development program.
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