The European Union gave final legislative approval to laws boosting its domestic defence industry, per EUbusiness.com. The Pentagon overhauled its missile procurement process after Iran's strikes exposed stockpile gaps, according to Военное дело. India's defence secretary signalled a procurement overhaul and reform of the state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation, pointing to a $25 billion annual industry opportunity, per Defence Watch.

The same week supplied the counter-argument. A new account of how China obtained sensitive components of the F-35 fighter jet appeared in The National Interest — a leak inside one of the most tightly export-controlled weapons programmes in the Western alliance. If a supply chain built explicitly to keep rivals out can still spring a hole, the premise behind this week's other three stories — that nations can simply build their way out of dependence — looks shakier.

India's own press makes the point without needing the F-35 case. Alongside the DRDO reform story, the Times of India argued that importing weapons carries a strategic cost of its own — foreign suppliers mean foreign leverage. Delhi's push to buy less and build more is itself an admission of how dependent decades of imports have made it.

Washington's own experience shows the limit from the other direction. The Pentagon's counter-drone marketplace, a program for fielding domestic, competitively sourced drone-defence systems, is starting to produce results, per Shephard Media. But a marketplace is, by definition, many competing vendors rather than a single sovereign supply line. Even the fix for dependence is a network.

Supporting this: none of the three programmes claim self-sufficiency — they describe faster contracts, new marketplaces and reformed institutions, while the F-35 case shows a rival still breached the tightest-controlled Western programme. Against it: the EU and Pentagon changes are too new to judge their effect, and the actual goal inside each government may be allied interoperability rather than pure national self-reliance — a narrower, more achievable target that the rhetoric of 'autonomy' obscures.

What to watch: whether the EU's approved laws produce joint European weapons programmes or simply subsidise national suppliers; whether India's DRDO reform survives contact with its own bureaucracy; and whether Washington says publicly how the F-35 parts reached China, a detail still missing from this week's account.