Excellence or Geography: The EDF 2021-2025

The European Defence Fund (EDF) and its planned successor, the defence window of the European Competitiveness Fund, are debated as a choice between excellence and geography. This paper adds a third yardstick, integration: allocation that builds lasting links between national industries and research systems. It uses all 4,184 participations in the five EDF calls of 2021–2025, parsed from the Commission's project factsheets, with civil benchmarks from Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. Small-state participation is broad, mostly industrial and increasingly repeated: the share of projects with a partner from the member states that joined in 2004 or later rose from 78 to 91 per cent, and their lasting ties run to the large industrial states. Leadership stays with the core, and the fund's breadth is ordinary for security research. States enter by different routes (champion, ecosystem, niche, research-led and academic-military), and size does not decide which: Germany, with 23.9 per cent of national contributions, holds 7.8 per cent of coordinations. Greece is the strongest case. With 1.3 per cent of contributions it coordinated 32 projects, more than Italy, on a research base trained in civil EU security research and a national strategy aimed at European programmes; the EDF turned that base into industrial leadership. Universities are a small part of the fund. It draws technical universities with large applied research and gives military academies access to European research, but it is not a route to excellence for weaker universities. The paper cannot show what the spreading rules caused or whether participation leads to procurement. The evidence extends to material published on 27 October 2026, including reporting on member-state divisions over the European Competitiveness Fund.