Made locally. Just in case.

Farnborough is an air show in much the same way that Davos is a ski resort. The description is accurate, but misses most of the business.

Several of our clients had been building towards it for months. Their diaries told a rather different story from the event website.

For them, Farnborough was a deadline. A reason to get decisions made, announcements agreed and the right people into the same heavily branded room. Strategies that had spent months being discussed in private would become visible over four days in Hampshire.

That was the first eye-opener. The second was the language.

For some products, where they are made was once little more than a procurement detail. At Farnborough, it felt increasingly like a feature.

European governments were asking American defence companies for local production, access to technology and greater control over maintenance and supply. The word doing much of the work was “sovereignty”.

“We hear loud and clear: Europeans want more sovereignty,” a Lockheed Martin executive told Reuters.

The manufacturers appear to have heard.

Lockheed Martin is planning to produce ATACMS missiles with Rheinmetall in Germany. The proposed venture would create the first ATACMS manufacturing facility outside the United States.

Anduril has agreed to produce thousands of Barracuda cruise missiles in Poland, with the intention of increasing the proportion of Polish and European components over time. Raytheon is expanding Stinger production in Europe.

The usual explanation for local manufacturing is economic. Factories create jobs, develop skills and provide ministers with somewhere suitable to wear a hard hat.

All of that matters. But it does not quite explain the urgency. The more valuable thing being made locally is confidence.

A country may own a defence system while relying on somebody else for its parts, software, specialist knowledge or permission to use it. If demand suddenly rises, supply routes falter or political relationships shift, that dependency becomes part of the product.

The concern is not really where the supplier comes from. It is where the capability sits and who ultimately controls it.

A well-designed global network may offer more resilience than a single domestic factory. But either way, customers want to know that the equipment they have bought will remain available, repairable and usable when circumstances become less convenient.

In other words, they are buying the ability to keep using what they have bought.

This is the gap that interests us at HARPP: the distance between what a complex business says it makes and what its customers actually value.

A factory may manufacture missiles. To the customer, it could provide freedom from a strategic dependency. A maintenance network may repair components, but its greater value lies in keeping an entire fleet operational. A second source of supply looks like extra capacity until the first one stops supplying.

The physical capability and the commercial meaning are not the same thing.

Complex businesses frequently communicate the first and leave people to work out the second. Their websites describe products, processes and technical credentials in impeccable detail. Somewhere inside all that accuracy is the reason anybody should care, waiting patiently to be discovered.

Defence is particularly prone to this. Ideas with very human consequences are wrapped in phrases such as “sovereign capability”, “industrial resilience” and “supply-chain security”. These terms are correct, but have been carefully engineered to avoid creating too much interest.

The thought underneath them is much simpler:

If things get difficult, will this still work?

The same question is appearing well beyond defence. It sits behind arguments about where critical data is stored, who controls cloud infrastructure, where medicines are manufactured and whether energy and communications systems can be maintained without outside permission.

These may look like operational details. Increasingly, they shape the value of the product and the story the business needs to tell about it.

“Made locally” does not automatically mean made better. But for certain products, it now promises something that performance specifications alone cannot.

A little more control over what happens next.

Sometimes the most important feature of a product is not what it can do on a good day, but whether it can still be made, maintained and used on a bad one.