As we close out 2025 and look toward 2026, the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Threats are increasing in scale, pace, and complexity. Defence and security budgets across Europe are rising accordingly. Order books are filling. Capital is flowing. On paper, this looks like momentum.
But momentum alone is not preparedness.
Unless we address the infrastructure that underpins how capability is designed, bought, and fielded, we risk creating a dangerous imbalance: a fast-growing market sitting on slow, fragmented delivery mechanisms. That is how bubbles form — not through lack of demand, but through an inability to turn intent into effect.
We have seen this pattern before. After the end of the Cold War, defence markets across Europe contracted not simply because threats receded, but because force-development and procurement systems were optimised for drawdown rather than adaptation. In the UK, Germany, and France alike, requirements fragmented, programmes were deferred or cancelled, and industrial capacity consolidated around fewer platforms and primes. Critical skills, production lines, and design authority were allowed to atrophy. When strategic competition returned in the late 2000s and 2010s, governments discovered that capability could not be regenerated at pace — not because funding was absent, but because the institutional and industrial foundations needed to translate intent into effect had already been eroded. The lesson is that delivery capacity, once lost, cannot be reconstituted quickly — and the cost is paid when speed matters most. That lesson matters again today.
Growth Is Real. So Are the Constraints.
European defence spending is no longer a future promise; it is embedded in national plans and alliance commitments. Over the past two years, equipment spending trajectories have been pushed further into the 2030s, and industry backlogs show that growth is already underway rather than speculative. Yet, as recent reporting around the UK’s Strategic Defence Review process has highlighted, even agreed defence investment plans can still be reshaped or delayed before they translate into executable programmes — a reminder that strategic intent does not automatically become delivered capability.
Industry is responding. Production capacity is expanding. New entrants are emerging across autonomy, AI, sensing, cyber, energy, and space.
But the binding constraint is no longer money or technology. It is delivery capacity — the ability to translate investment into fielded, interoperable capability at pace.
Procurement systems designed for linear programmes are being asked to cope with rapid iteration, contested environments, and coalition operating models. Innovation pipelines exist, but too often terminate in pilots that never transition. Multinational collaboration is encouraged, but rarely engineered end-to-end.
The risk is not under-investment. The risk is misalignment at scale.
Europe’s Advantage — and Its Responsibility
Europe’s strategic advantage lies in coalition. No single nation can meet today’s threat environment alone, but collectively the resources already exist — industrial, financial, and operational.
Unlocking those collaborative resources is not just about efficiency. It is how Europe offsets domestic capacity constraints, workforce shortages, and fiscal pressure across the alliance. Done properly, collaboration enhances deterrence by making readiness visible, credible, and shared.
The UK-Nordic defence relationship illustrates this when it moves beyond dialogue into delivery. Integration across air surveillance and maritime domain awareness in the High North — including shared command and control, aligned force posture, and interoperable planning — reduces decision latency, improves asset availability, and shortens response timelines in a strategically sensitive region.
But such examples remain exceptions. Too often, collaboration stops at coordination rather than execution.
The Structural Issue We Haven’t Resolved
The core issue is not ambition. It is ownership.
Across Europe, innovation is funded without a clearly accountable route to adoption. Capability is demonstrated without a named delivery owner. Risk is pushed outward while authority remains centralised. Ministers are asked to move faster, but bear asymmetric exposure when things fail — in audit, in Parliament, and in public.
This creates a rational drag on pace.
As long as transition from innovation to service entry remains structurally ambiguous, speed will always lose to caution — regardless of intent.
What Needs to Change in 2026
If 2025 was about recognising the gap, 2026 must be about closing it.
One shift matters more than all others: treating transition as a first-class responsibility, not an afterthought.
That means:
- Multinational delivery by default, where shared problem sets exist — aligning requirements, acquisition, and sustainment from the outset.
- Designing transition pathways at programme inception, with explicit answers to who buys, who integrates, and on what timeline.
- Rebalancing risk deliberately, so governments remain accountable but are no longer structurally incentivised to slow down.
None of this removes ministerial responsibility. It makes it more defensible — by replacing diffuse risk with managed risk, and opaque processes with explicit decision points.
If We Did One Thing in 2026
If Europe did one thing differently in 2026, it would be this:
Name an accountable owner for capability transition — with the authority to align policy, funding, and procurement across national and coalition boundaries.
Not another initiative. Not another framework. Ownership.
Because deterrence is not created by budgets or announcements. It is created when capability is fielded, interoperable, and ready — visibly and repeatedly.
Growth without delivery reform will not make us safer. Investment without execution will not create deterrence.
The opportunity ahead is real. So is the responsibility.
