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Europe is seeking to strengthen its defence capabilities and reduce its long-standing reliance on the United States. This has encouraged European states to increase defence spending, expand domestic production and diversify their procurement partnerships beyond traditional suppliers. Yet diversification does not necessarily amount to strategic independence. Replacing reliance on one external supplier with reliance on several others may reduce concentration risk without giving European states full control over the technologies on which their defence capabilities depend.   This distinction is becoming increasingly important as modern military systems become more dependent on software, data and interconnected command-and-control architectures. A country may possess the physical hardware of a weapons system while remaining dependent on a foreign supplier for critical software, upgrades, maintenance or technological integration. The question of who controls these underlying technologies can therefore be as important as who manufactures or owns the weapon itself.   The recent Achilles Shield agreement between Greece and Israel provides a useful illustration of this dilemma. The €3 billion agreement will establish a multilayered Greek air and missile defence network incorporating Israeli systems alongside a Greek-controlled command-and-control architecture. However, a dispute over access to the systems' source code has raised questions over the extent of Greece's technological control. The case highlights a broader issue for European defence: can greater diversification deliver genuine independence if critical elements of military capabilities remain technologically dependent on external powers?