Francesco Griguolo retweetledi
🇮🇹 Italy Just Told Boeing to Get in the Bin
Let’s be clear about what’s happened here. Italy, a country that has been loyally refuelling its air force from American-built tankers for fifteen years, has just written a €1.39 billion cheque to Airbus. Six A330 MRTTs, signed on 16 April, quietly published to the EU procurement portal on 19 May, and absolutely devastating in its implications.
This is not a procurement decision. Procurement decisions are boring. Men in grey suits argue about maintenance contracts and through-life costs and nobody outside a defence ministry cares. This is a statement, delivered in the universal language of very large sums of money.
And the statement is: we’re done.
You have to appreciate the audacity of it. Italy is a NATO member. Italy hosts American troops. Italy has spent a decade and a half operating Boeing’s KC-767, which is, by most accounts, a perfectly serviceable aircraft. There was no catastrophic failure here, no scandal, no tanker that caught fire over the Adriatic. The Italians simply looked at the current state of American reliability, looked at an Airbus catalogue, and made a decision that any sensible person watching Washington in 2026 would probably also make.
The A330 MRTT is, for what it’s worth, an exceptional machine. It is larger, more capable, and rather more elegant than what it replaces. But nobody is writing about it because of its impressive fuel offload capacity. They’re writing about it because Italy just became the latest European country to quietly redirect a billion-plus euros away from American industry, and toward the continent it actually lives on.
Boeing, meanwhile, continues to have what can only be described as a very bad decade.
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