Turn your excess national defense champions into continental ones.
Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and questions about the American commitment to NATO have cast a spotlight on European efforts to safeguard security on the continent. But today, the major hurdles confronting Europe are no longer defense spending and industrial capacity. At both the national and multinational levels, Europeans have clearly stepped up funding, while military industrial output has surged and looks likely to continue. Instead, the major challenge impeding European security independence today is the fragmentation of its defense industry. In fact, this is not a new problem, but overcoming it will require European leaders to boldly exploit the dual security crises posed by Russia’s war and U.S. waivering.
For nearly 25 years, European defense spending, on average, declined. From the end of the Cold War until Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, most European countries cut defense spending. As a result, military capacity and capabilities also declined across Europe. Those trends bottomed out in 2014, and since then, average European defense spending has risen.
This accelerated dramatically starting in 2022, after Russia unleashed its second, larger, and far more brutal invasion of Ukraine. Most recently, European doubts about America’s commitment have spurred additional investments. For example, the United Kingdom announced a defense-budget increase, to be paid for in part by cutting foreign-development assistance. The European Union has proposed to relax fiscal rules that constrain members’ defense spending, to offer €150 billion in low-interest loans for multinational procurement projects, and to expand European Investment Bank lending for defense projects. Germany’s outgoing and incoming governments changed the country’s constitution to exempt defense spending from strict debt rules and created a €500 billion fund for infrastructure that will have clear benefits for military mobility across the heart of Europe. And France, Belgium, Latvia, Denmark, Estonia, and Sweden have all announced defense-budget increases over the last several months. Existing trends and these recent announcements make it clear that resourcing isn’t Europe’s big problem when it comes to military power.