Introduction
The past three years have brutally exposed Europe’s many geopolitical weaknesses. When at dawn on the 24th of February 2022, Russian troops crossed into Ukraine, it was the first time in over a generation that hostile heavy armor was rolling towards the heart of Europe. The invasion shattered the continent’s three decade-old illusion that war against peer adversaries was a thing of the past and shone a harsh spotlight on its numerous military shortfalls: stunning ammunition shortages, [1], [2] severely limited deployable combat divisions, [3] and paltry naval readiness [4] to name but a few.
Not long after, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and subsequent return to the White House upended what was left of Europe’s security order: American military assistance was now far from guaranteed, and the US President was openly questioning NATO’s Article 5. [5] The exposed fault lines multiplied and worsened: Europe depended on American logistical support to move its own forces, [6] on American intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance to accurately aim its weapons, on American command-and-control to conduct battlefield operations, and countless others. [7]
Besieged, suddenly, by problems they had long disregarded, the reality finally dawned on Europe’s leaders: if the Old Continent was to remain a first-rate power, it needed to stand on its own two military feet. To achieve this, the EU’s member states turned to increased spending, and it is on spending that the discussion these past three years has almost exclusively focused.
Their efforts have undoubtedly yielded meaningful results: collective defense outlays hit a post-Cold War record high for the second year running in 2024 (€326 billion); [8] military spending will soon be exempt from the deficit strictures imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact; [9] and credible proposals for joint purchases of war materiel are on the table with the Commission’s €150 billion loan facility [10] as well as the European Defense Mechanism which would “buy and own defense equipment” [11] on behalf of members.
The problem, however, with seeking to solve a challenge as complex as becoming a credible hard power actor by throwing money at it, is that one needs lots and lots of money. Unfortunately for Europe, its record spending is still barely a third of Washington’s annual defense cheque despite the bloc rivalling the US in economic output. Worse still, defense market fragmentation, lack of standardization, the actual allocation of cut-to-the-bone budgets, and other shortcomings all leave the continent’s combat power leagues behind what the financial ratio would otherwise indicate.
It would be easy to say that Europe should spend more, much more, and to say so would be unquestionably true. But it would also be unproductive – in the four years of a dubiously-reliable first Trump presidency and three years of war on the Eastern flank, Europe has shown itself unwilling or unable to crank expenditures to the required levels – and inefficient, as increased spending without additional reforms will ultimately hamstring per-euro impact.
To achieve rapid, meaningful advances in European military capability and turbo-charge ongoing efforts, the Old Continent should capitalize on its most effective instrument of collective action: the European Union.
Consequently, this article trains its sights on the few levers that can deliver robust results at pace, without demanding exorbitant financing – measures where the European Commission is already empowered to catalyze meaningful progress, and where such progress promises outsized strategic payoffs.
Three such force-multipliers stand out: a robust single market for arms procurement, continental military logistics, and a sovereign kill-chain. Together, they would unlock European forces’ ability to consistently and rapidly (re)arm, move, and strike, laying the groundwork for a credible deter-or-destroy policy.
Strengthening the Single Market – Arms Edition
The Single Market, rivalled perhaps only by the Schengen Area, is widely regarded as the EU’s crowning achievement. Under its auspices, nearly half a billion consumers from 27 highly developed nations form one of the world’s most powerful economic blocs. Its monolithic nature fuels its power – the Union executive has exclusive dominion over competition and trade as well as advanced competencies in a plethora of related financial and regulatory matters.
With one glaring exception. The defense industry – judged too close to national sovereignty – was fenced off from the very rules that make the Single Market a goliath on the world stage. The core of this exemption lives in article 346(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) which allows near-blanket derogation from EU rules in matters related to the “production of or trade in arms, munitions and war material” [12].
Tack on decades of smaller carve-outs and informal omissions that eschewed giving the EU a greater role in the functioning of the defense industry, and one can begin to see why the sector still resembles its pre-Single Market ancestor.
The result is high fragmentation and inefficiency. Europe operates four separate main-battle-tank production lines, has two rival six-generation fighter projects, a dozen incompatible artillery calibers, divergent export control regimes, and countless other frictions. The damage this wreaks on the continent’s collective combat ability needs little clarification: frontline interoperability is harder, delivery schedules longer, per-unit costs higher, magazines shallower, technological quality lower, and so forth.
Although the EU cannot single-handedly resolve all these issues immediately, it can bring progress back onto the right track by affecting both the way the industry operates as well as the way governments engage with it.
For instance, while treaty reform is implausible, the Commission could issue a so-called interpretive guidance, as it has in other areas, to restrict the scope of art. 346(2) – for example, to matters involving only nuclear weapons and cryptography – and so force open most major arms procurements. Simultaneously, the Directorate-General for Competition could draft policy to incentivize and facilitate mergers to forge pan-European industrial champions, akin to Airbus or MBDA; an approach that is likely to gain support from the EU’s Franco-German motor under Macron and Merz.
The Union’s executive can also impact the diversity of, and innovation present in, the defense sector by lowering barriers to entry for miltech startups. It could propose changes to defense contracting rules laid out in Directive 2009/81/EC [13], the heft of which is often a cause for delays and a major barrier to entry for non-prime contractors. Additionally, it could seek to adjust AML/CTF regulations – through delegated and/or implementing acts under relevant Directives and Regulations – which currently make it difficult for defense-tech startups (especially those seeking to incorporate in the EU from Ukraine in recent years) from launching operations.
These changes would pave the way for greater and improved cross-border competition, enhanced technological progress, and the emergence of European arms champions.
To amplify these effects, Brussels could precondition loans from the proposed SAFE instrument on orders coming from groups of member states, rather than individual ones; and give priority to “anchor orders” – large-scale, multi-annual contracts whose fulfilment requires industrial expansion. Furthermore, the Commission ought to seize the moment to clinch a deal on a unified arms export regime. If not external (due to limited appetite from some members) then internal, to slash the inefficiencies and burden that existing disparities create for primes and startups alike.
Still at home, the Berlaymont could begin strengthening the bond between academia and the military-industrial complex. Horizon Europe’s Pillar II, cluster 3 already allows funds to be directed towards dual-use research (albeit with restrictions), [14] and a more flexible interpretation of the text could permit a more serious reallocation of this budget line. In the same vein, Ursula Von Der Leyen’s recent announcement of a €500m fund to attract foreign scientific talent to the EU [15] should have national security considerations baked into it from the get-go.
Looking outwards, the executive could leverage its trade-policy muscle in a bid to secure critical materials such as energetics, metals, micro-chips, and others, much as it did with vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. [16] The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy could also kick off the process of empowering the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm, with an equivalent to the US’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program.
Paired with greater internal consolidation, improved resource access, and enhanced R&D from academic institutions, a European FMS effort would likely trigger a snowball effect, further bringing down costs, strengthening alliances, and providing vital operational feedback.
The momentum is here. Defense spending continues to rise in Europe and political leaders have begun to embrace re-armament. The Commission holds many of the keys necessary to take the continent’s arms industry from patchwork to powerhouse. With the right steps, it can translate added cash into industrial depth that promises a steady flow of advanced weaponry in peace or war, and thus directly contributes to deterrence.
Forging a Continental Military-Logistics Backbone
That logistics is central to military victory is nothing new. Rome’s legions weaponized the Via Appia and Eisenhower’s Red Ball Express kept Allied armies moving in 1944, with countless other examples in between. Yet modern-day Europe appears to have missed the memo: in 2025, it is faster and surer to send an Abrams brigade from Colorado to reinforce the Suwałki Gap than it is to shift armor in from Spain.
To illustrate, let us surge Spain’s Brigada “Guzmán el Bueno” X (X Mech BDE) to a hypothetical flashpoint on the Eastern flank – a journey of ~3,000 km involving 4-5 border crossings (depending on routing). Before departing, it must file a NATO/EU Form 302 for cross-border military transport for every vehicle and pallet load and submit them to all transited nations. Each nation can take between 15 and 45 days to approve them. [17]
Once under way by rail or road, they may be delayed at customs [18] or bridges since many lack tonnage signs. [19] They could be diverted because the weight of their tanks exceeds road traffic regulations, [20] tunnels are too small for them, [21] or key bridges are unable to support heavy armor. [22] In Germany, X Mech BDE would need to submit special forms to move between each federal region, [23] would be limited to movement at night to avoid disturbing civilian traffic [24], and could be rerouted due to noise abatement zones. [25]
Rail, the preferred option for mass movement of armor, offers its own additional headaches. The brigade would have to book transport slots 35-40 days in advance [26] to get the specialized crew, loading equipment, and flat-bed wagons required (there is a shortage in Europe [27]), and because Deutsche Bahn Cargo only allocates certain times and very limited capacity [28] for defense traffic. [29] Delays can mean missing a slot and being forced to wait days or weeks for another one.
At the Polish-Lithuanian border, a break-of-gauge from 1 435 mm to 1 520 mm halts progress again: the brigade must transfer everything by crane onto Soviet-gauge stock in a lengthy drill that is further extended if equipment or crews are scarce.
Sea transport too, is challenging. Roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) ships suitable for armor are almost all chartered by the hour, meaning short-notice needs may be challenging to fulfil. What’s more, less than a dozen European ports can discharge a full brigade and are unlikely to give it priority, seeking instead to weave its ships into commercial traffic in the best case, or sending them to the back of the queue in the worst.
Almost all these hurdles could be avoided with airlift, except that Europe doesn’t have heavy airlift. Its largest indigenous cargo plane is the A400M Atlas which can carry light armored vehicles but not main battle tanks. For these, Boeing C-5s or C-17s are needed, of which Europe has only a handful – far from enough to move a brigade.
Current, optimistic estimates say that Brigada “Guzmán el Bueno” X would arrive in the Baltics two to three weeks after departing.[30] A more realistic timeline is four to five weeks, likely too late to help and certainly too late to deter.
In wartime, many or perhaps all the bureaucratic hurdles described above would likely vanish, significantly reducing the flash-to-bang time for troop transit. But geopolitical urgency will not reinforce bridges or materialize strategic airlift out of nowhere. Moreover, current deficiencies will only compound when inundated with the volume of armor, artillery, air defense batteries, supplies, and other equipment required for major armed conflict. While funding is therefore indispensable to harden chokepoints, build redundancy, and acquire lift, Commission policy changes can have a meaningful effect.
As a matter of priority, the Berlaymont should move to open the EU’s 500-plus civilian intermodal terminals to military “piggy-back” loading, letting main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) roll directly onto low-floor flatcars. This would drastically reduce time spent travelling to and queueing for the handful of available military railheads, increase the Union’s ability to rail heavy armor severalfold almost overnight, and substantially boost resilience against adversarial precision strikes seeking to cripple rail deployments. A one-article, Commission-proposed amendment to the TEN-T Regulation relying on the urgency procedure could achieve this in slightly over a year.
To similarly bolster at-sea capacity, the EU could broker standby charters with Ro-Ro operators, replicating the proven US Maritime Security Program model to ensure a low-cost, high-readiness fleet of ships is available in the event of an emergency. Doing so would require a new Regulation, likely adoptable in under 18 months, which could empower DG MOVE to fund and contract a standby fleet of EU-flag Ro-Ro ships, delegate day-to-day readiness monitoring to EMSA, and give EDA or the EU Military Staff the activation trigger and military specification authority.
Lastly, while heavy airlift is fundamentally a matter of buying the required platforms, the Commission could leverage the Re-Arm Europe Plan, which already lists strategic airlift as a priority, to incentivize larger-volume, group purchases of shared assets by offering favorable loan terms; and earmark CEF-Military Mobility grants in the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework for dual-use runway upgrades. Together, these measures would meaningfully improve heavy airlift availability, capacity, and reach.
Bad logistics do more than slow brigades; they invite enemy aggression by signaling that reinforcements are not a factor worth considering. If Europe’s legions of new tanks, IFVs, and artillery are to have maximal (or indeed, any) impact, the continent must urgently repair and harmonize its military movement grid.
Wiring Europe’s Sovereign Kill-Chain
The anatomy of a kill-chain is conceptually straightforward: gather information to find the target, analyze and refine it into actionable intelligence, decide what to do, and do it. These four phases – collectively, John Boyd’s OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, act) – form a constantly repeating closed circuit that lies at the heart of warfighting. The measure of quality for an OODA loop is its ability to maximize the competing priorities of speed and accuracy in service of target elimination.
In practice, however, every joint in the loop introduces challenges and frictions. Observation assets must have precise sensors, expansive coverage, and high revisit rates; multi-modal intelligence must be rapidly and continuously deconflicted, fused, and disseminated; decision-makers and weaponeers require real-time views of available assets and ongoing engagements; and firing elements need precise strike coordinates and reliable navigation systems to ensure weapons hit their marks. All this must be underpinned by robust arsenals and high-throughput, reliable communication links between phases and assets.
Over the past several decades, Europeans have opted to overcome these challenges by outsourcing vast portions of their OODA loops to the United States. Today, although countries like the UK and France possess capable independent kill-chain infrastructure, neither they nor Europe collectively can even approach US scale or reach. Put simply, “Europe’s dependence on U.S. command-and-control networks and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets is deep-seated and continuous,” [31] with NATO’s overall ISR capability being “overwhelmingly US in origin.” [32]
The result is that Europe is at present, essentially incapable of “engag[ing] and destroy[ing] high-value military targets at operational and strategic depth without U.S. support.” [33] The consequences of such a reliance were brought into sharp focus on March 5th, 2025, when the Trump administration temporarily halted intelligence sharing with Ukraine and in so doing, rendered its HIMARS batteries “ineffective.” [34]
The lesson (and Charles de Gaulle’s vindication) couldn’t be clearer: dependence on an external actor in matters of war can and will cost lives and territory. What’s more, the existence of a quasi-veto power over European strikes undermines the continent’s deterrence, especially in instances where the United States doesn’t have vested interest in a European cause.
Swift, far-reaching changes are necessary to redress this imbalance. Europe’s kill-chain must, in essence, be rebuilt end-to-end, and while the heavy lifting rests with national forces, the Commission can fast-track progress by advancing Europe’s collective sensing, fusion, and PNT capabilities.
Within the sensing layer, the Commission could, as early as the 2026 Horizon Europe Work Programme, open a Cluster 4-Space topic dedicated to High-Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS), building on the EuroHAPS demonstrator [35] to field stratospheric ISR and communications nodes. In parallel, it can deploy its upgraded powers under the revised FDI Screening Regulation to flag and, where necessary, issue opinions on acquisitions of critical ISR suppliers – currently listed as “advanced sensing technologies” in the EU critical-technology list [36] – to protect such entities from predatory takeovers. [37]
Integrating this with the cross-Commission economic-security “one-stop shop” [38] would give the Berlaymont a holistic view of such threats. To further strengthen its hand, it could wield the Foreign Subsidies Regulation’s ex-officio tool [39] to probe opaque state-backed bids for EU ISR firms that fall below FDI-notification thresholds.
In the medium term, the Commission could also reinforce Europe’s space-based ISR by doubling-down on deploying an EU military intelligence constellation. [40] A dedicated, restricted-access constellation – separate from the civil Copernicus Sentinels – capable of sub-meter resolution on both SAR and electro-optical satellites would be a major step towards boosting indigenous European ISR capability.
Fusion poses the greatest challenge. The Commission’s mandate over intelligence is deliberately narrow and substantive gains in this domain depend on member states voluntarily pooling data. Precedents, like the Club de Berne or Europol demonstrate that when capitals share information, Europe’s situational awareness deepens markedly. To reshore kill-chain targeting capabilities, the Berlaymont could offer to set up the operational scaffolding to enable more streamlined national collaboration.
Specifically, building on existing pillars such as SIAC, IntCen, and SatCen, the Commission could champion a European Fusion and Targeting Centre to pool battlefield intelligence and develop targets in real time. Should the required Council unanimity prove elusive, an almost identical capability could take shape under PESCO, sidestepping the veto trap while still delivering the effect.
To bridge the classified-cloud gap, the Commission could ask ENISA and the EDA (under the Cybersecurity Act [41]) to co-create a voluntary EUCS-Defense certification scheme for EU SECRET workloads. This opt-in model avoids Art. 346 TFEU-related complications and delivers one EU-wide certification instead of dozens of national schemes. Participating member states would immediately gain seamless, EU-wide SECRET-level data-sharing capabilities, while cloud providers benefit from a unified certification benchmark that cuts audit duplication, lowers market-entry barriers, and unlocks scalable pan-European business opportunities. Building atop the civilian EUCS framework, [42] ENISA could likely slash technical drafting time to about a year.
Finally, the Commission should drive accelerated military uptake of Galileo’s encrypted Public Regulated Service (PRS). To do so, it could adopt an Implementing Decision under Decision 1104/2011/EU [43] that fixes a near-term deadline for every member state to stand up a fully-fledged Competent PRS Authority. To support rollout, it could launch an EDIRPA-financed joint-procurement framework – starting with Leonardo’s certified PRS/multi-GNSS receiverxliv and adding a second European supplier to avoid monopoly risk. In parallel, it could speed compliance by conditioning EU defense procurement funds on a PRS-readiness requirement. These measures would rapidly give European commanders a sovereign, jam-resistant alternative to the US GPS M-Code, ensuring that strike authority rests squarely at home.
Europe’s kill-chain architecture has been on American life support since before the turn of the millennium, posing challenges to the EU’s operational flexibility and decision-making autonomy. Though the Commission’s levers in this area are limited, it nevertheless can and should act wherever possible to alleviate some of the burden weighing on national capitals.
Conclusion
By almost any measure of combat readiness – ammunition stockpiles, ISR revisit rates, days-of-supply, force elements at readiness, factory throughputs, etc. – Europe’s armed forces are deep in the red. Repairing the damage that has accumulated over decades of underinvestment and American dependence will first and foremost require spending on a scale not seen since the Cold War and the political stamina to sustain it for decades.
Spending, however, is neither a panacea nor the only option. Targeted policymaking by the Union’s executive, wielding powers it already holds, can enhance Europe’s short- to medium-term military posture and ensure that defense budgets go further.
A genuine single market for war materiel – enriched by European champions, improved military-academic alignment, and a robust startup ecosystem – would drive down unit costs, accelerate development timelines, improve performance, and provide the industrial depth needed for wartime production surges. A streamlined military mobility regime would dramatically reduce the time to impact for continental forces, eliminating adversarial windows of opportunity. And a sovereign kill-chain based on European satellites, intelligence fusion hubs, and independent PNT capabilities would let commanders find, fix, and finish targets quickly, reliably, and without external reliance.
Concerted action across this arm-move-strike spectrum would establish a bedrock foundation of military power, allowing every extra future euro to deliver augmented lethality to deter would-be aggressors, defeat active threats, and secure vital interests around the globe. Neglecting them will throttle the effectiveness of new spending and may well end in another dawn border crossing for which Europe is woefully unprepared. Whether its democratic norms and way of life would survive such an event is a question the Old Continent must ensure is never asked.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer or any other affiliated entity.
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