The history of transatlantic armaments cooperation goes back to the beginning of the Cold War. Since then, however, the nature of cooperation has changed considerably, from simple licensing of US systems to Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s to co-production arrangements in the 1970s, followed by government-to-government joint development programs in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, industry-led cooperation has become the most prominent feature