For a long time, the discussion about European defence took place at a safe distance from real choices. Political leaders praised “strategic autonomy” while defence budgets declined, firms shifted toward specialised high-end products, and planners worked from the assumption that the United States would continue to supply the heavy platforms, the key enablers and the political backbone. That assumption no longer holds.
Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, the return of Trump to the White House and a new wave of NATO and EU decisions have put Europe on a compressed timetable. Defence budgets are climbing across almost every capital. New production lines for artillery shells and missiles are coming on stream. EU bodies are, for the first time, building financial and regulatory tools that explicitly aim to recreate a war-fighting industrial base. At the same time, the United States is shifting toward a doctrine of burden shifting rather than burden sharing. Washington plans to keep nuclear forces and high-end enablers in Europe while expecting Europeans to shoulder most of the conventional workload.
The central issue is no longer whether Europeans ought to spend more. The live question is whether the extra resources and the new instruments can move Europe from scattered dependence toward genuine capability autonomy. The latest Ifri assessment of European capabilities across land, air, maritime and space illustrates both the distance still to travel and the areas where Europe has real strengths and could, with coherent choices, close much of the gap by the early 2030s.
One way to approach the problem is to distinguish three layers. The first is the visible layer of platforms and troop numbers, where Europe no longer appears weak on paper. The second is the less visible layer of enablers and logistics, where reliance on American intelligence, air defence, command networks and transport remains severe. The third is the industrial layer, which decides whether Europe can sustain high-intensity operations once the ammunition bought in an emergency has been used. Across all three, the practical test is not whether Europe can act alone in every respect, but whether it can function as a real first responder in its own region if Washington is distracted or hesitant.
This analysis draws together the findings of the Ifri report and the new political context created by NATO’s higher spending targets, the European Defence Industry Programme and the Trump administration’s Defence Strategy and Posture Review. It asks what kind of armed forces Europe is likely to have by the end of this decade if present trends continue, where the main vulnerabilities lie, and what would amount to “success” in operational and strategic terms.
The strategic frame has moved: from burden sharing to burden shifting
For most of the period after the Cold War, NATO’s internal bargain was straightforward. European allies would maintain limited but usable forces, contribute politically and economically, and support US-led operations in places such as the Balkans and Afghanistan. The United States would provide the bulk of high-end combat power and enabling capabilities, together with the nuclear umbrella. Even when European leaders spoke of autonomy, most planning texts quietly treated the American backbone as a constant.
Trump’s return to office and the US Defence Strategy and Posture Review have altered that logic. The “Trump card” work by the EU Institute for Security Studies highlights how the administration’s own doctrine argues for shifting most conventional deterrence in Europe onto European allies, while the United States offers nuclear guarantees and a narrower set of enablers.
On that basis, several scenarios are now standard in European strategic debate. At one end of the spectrum, the older pattern in which US forces still lead operations, as they did in the 1990s air campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, looks less and less credible in the European theatre. In the middle, a “leading from behind” or “offshore balancing” approach would see Washington provide intelligence, long-range strike and logistics while European forces fight on the ground and in the air, broadly the pattern that has emerged in support to Ukraine. At the harsher end lies a “cash-and-carry” setting in which US support is largely confined to weapons sales and security guarantees take the form of vague political language rather than concrete contingency plans. The Ifri capability assessment translates these scenarios into growing exposure to a “kill switch” risk, the possibility that decisions in Washington on export controls, software access or satellite services could directly constrain European operational freedom at a moment of crisis.
This change in posture coincides with a striking increase in European defence spending. NATO data indicate that in 2014 only three allies met the two percent of GDP benchmark. By 2024, more than twenty did so, and in 2025 all thirty two allies are expected to meet or marginally exceed that target for the first time. (NATO) At the same time, leaders agreed at the Hague summit in June 2025 to work toward a more demanding benchmark: three and a half percent of GDP for core defence spending plus another one and a half percent for related security investments, such as cyber defence and critical infrastructure, by 2035. For now only Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are close to this new three and a half percent level.
In other words, money is beginning to catch up with rhetoric. The unresolved questions are whether institutions and industrial structures can adjust at the same pace, and whether the pattern of outlays corresponds to the pattern of gaps identified in operational analysis, rather than to domestic political pressures alone.
On the EU side, the European Defence Industry Programme, agreed in October 2025, marks a quiet but important shift. With a budget of one and a half billion euros in grants for the period from 2025 to 2027, including three hundred million earmarked for integrating Ukraine’s defence industry into the European base, EDIP is meant to steer member states toward joint procurement and to reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities by capping the share of third-country components at thirty five percent of a system’s value. A separate initiative under the ReArm Europe label seeks to use flexibility in the EU budget to speed up defence-related investment more broadly.
NATO leaders support this new activism, but with reservations. Secretary General Mark Rutte has publicly cautioned against turning EDIP into a protectionist instrument that would lock non-EU allies such as the United States, the United Kingdom or Turkey out of European defence contracts. In his view, new obstacles that exclude these partners would raise costs and slow production just as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea deepen their own defence ties.
The result is a landscape with higher budgets, more demanding targets, new EU mechanisms and a transatlantic relationship that remains close yet increasingly transactional. In that context, European capability autonomy cannot be equated with self-sufficiency. It means the capacity to fight and sustain operations in the European theatre even if American support is limited in volume, delayed in time or constrained by domestic politics. That is the standard against which Europe’s land, air, maritime and space capabilities must be assessed.
Land forces: mass is returning, depth is still lacking
Taken at face value, Europe’s land forces no longer look hollow. Central European states such as Poland and Romania have launched major rearmament drives, buying Korean tanks and howitzers, American rocket artillery and air defence systems, and expanding their armoured and mechanised brigades. Western European governments have started to reverse earlier cuts, re-establish heavy brigades and relearn the fundamentals of large-unit manoeuvre. If one adds up main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers across NATO Europe, the resulting totals now match or exceed Russian holdings, particularly once Belarusian units are removed from the calculation.
The Ifri study, however, shows how deceptive raw platform counts can be. Availability rates are uneven, especially for older fleets such as German Leopard 2s or legacy infantry vehicles. Stocks of spare parts are shallow. In several armies, the formal order of battle includes vehicles that exist on the books but cannot realistically be deployed without cannibalising others. Training for high-intensity conflict at division and corps level is only now restarting after three decades in which exercises focused mainly on stabilisation and expeditionary missions.
More fundamentally, the land domain mirrors a familiar European pattern. The visible spearhead receives significant funding, while the enabling shaft is left thin. Artillery illustrates the imbalance. Russia entered the war in Ukraine with a large advantage in tube and rocket artillery. European armies had retired many guns and launchers after the Cold War, judging them of limited use in peacekeeping and counter-insurgency. Multiple launch rocket systems in particular were allowed to decline. That imbalance has not been fully corrected. The Ifri analysis notes that European MLRS holdings remain far below the levels required to equip divisions and corps for deep fires at ranges between one hundred and fifty and three hundred kilometres. A large share of long-range rocket capability is concentrated in Poland and Romania.
Drones and loitering munitions can offset some of these shortfalls by shortening the sensor to shooter chain and improving accuracy. Progress, however, is uneven. Poland’s effort to integrate tactical drones and loitering munitions into manoeuvre brigades is often cited as a model. Many Western European forces, by contrast, have run into regulatory constraints, slow procurement procedures and limited scale. Numerous projects sit at prototype stage or are deployed only in small experimental batches. The war in Ukraine has made clear that without large numbers of inexpensive reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions, ground units lose tempo and waste ammunition. The industrial ecosystem for such systems inside Europe is growing, but remains fragmented.
Engineering and mobility form another area of weakness. River crossing units, mine-clearing vehicles, breaching tools and heavy bridging assets have been cut sharply in many armies. The figures in the Ifri report are striking. Russian forces maintain a much larger inventory of specialised engineering and mine warfare vehicles, while European numbers for armoured engineers, bridge layers and demining units are modest. Even where equipment is available, the broader infrastructure often is not. Civilian rail networks are privatised, fragmented and in some cases physically unsuited to moving heavy armoured formations across borders at speed. Road and bridge standards differ widely. EU efforts under the “military mobility” label exist, but practical upgrades are slow and frequently delayed by domestic planning disputes.
Air defence for land forces is a third crucial gap. After years of assuming that friendly aircraft would dominate the skies, European armies field relatively few modern short and medium range surface to air systems. NATO planning documents indicate that European stocks would need to rise by several hundred percent to meet Integrated Air and Missile Defence requirements. Recent national programmes, such as Poland’s NAREW system developed with MBDA or Germany’s push to expand Patriot production, are significant steps, but they start from a very low baseline. The spread of cheap drones and loitering munitions has shifted part of the burden toward very short range anti-drone systems, where Germany and France have taken new steps to rearm, yet the overall architecture remains thin.
The connective tissue of land warfare, finally, lies in information and electronic warfare. Here dependence on the United States is still marked. Tactical communications systems remain fragmented along national lines, often relying on different encryption standards and proprietary software. Many forces are tempted to lean heavily on commercial satellite services, including non-European constellations, which creates new sovereignty concerns. Ground-based electronic warfare units exist in most armies, but usually in small numbers, whereas Russian brigades regularly field integrated EW elements able to detect, jam or mislead Western systems.
Taken together, these factors mean that, even if Europe can generate a respectable number of brigades, its ability to sustain large, intense land campaigns without US intelligence, air defence and logistics support remains in doubt. The positive development is that the nature of these gaps is now widely recognised. The risk is that political impatience and a bias for visible equipment will continue to favour new platforms over the less visible engineering units, logistics battalions, ISR assets and ammunition reserves that determine whether a force can endure once the first phase of fighting has passed.
Air and space: strong combat fleets, weak foundations
In relative terms, the air and space domain is Europe’s most obvious strength. European air forces are renewing their fleets at pace. Older fourth generation fighters are being replaced by upgraded Eurofighters, Rafale, Gripen E and a growing number of F 35s. This mix will give European air arms a combination of capable multirole platforms and low observable aircraft. In terms of technical and operational quality, this leaves Europe significantly ahead of Russia and behind only the United States and, in some niche areas, China.
Yet the Ifri assessment and other studies converge on a clear warning. Without adequate stocks of munitions and sufficient enablers, combat aircraft remain underused. Inventories of precision guided weapons are still limited. For years, procurement practices in Europe favoured maintaining airframe numbers over filling magazines. European production lines for air to air and air to surface missiles are well established but tuned to peacetime demand. Before the war in Ukraine, annual orders for many categories of guided munitions numbered in the low hundreds. Building up stocks to sustain a long air campaign will demand not only higher budgets but also a different industrial model, with multi year contracts that justify investment in extra capacity.
Reliance on US weapons is another constraint. A large portion of European air to air missiles and guided bombs comes from American production, and their resupply in wartime would be exposed to US domestic politics and to the needs of US forces in the Indo Pacific. Reducing this dependence does not mean copying every US system one by one. It does require an industrial baseline that can manufacture at scale the categories of weapons that matter most in the European theatre.
The situation is even more acute in the suppression of enemy air defences. Over the past three decades, most European air forces allowed this mission to fade. Only a handful of states maintained small stocks of HARM missiles and dedicated aircraft. Modernisation has begun, but at a slow pace. Until that changes, any serious SEAD effort against Russian defences would lean heavily on US assets.
The most serious vulnerability, however, lies in the enablers that make modern air operations possible. Airborne early warning platforms, tanker fleets, strategic and theatre transport aircraft and dedicated ISR platforms form the backbone of sustained air campaigns. Europe has made some progress, in particular with the multinational MRTT tanker fleet and new AEW purchases, including Swedish GlobalEye and NATO’s decision to adopt the E 7 Wedgetail. Even so, European inventories of tankers and AEW aircraft are too small to support prolonged large scale operations, and many of the most capable ISR platforms flying over Europe still belong to the United States.
Space amplifies this dependence. European militaries rely entirely on the US GPS constellation for precise positioning, since Galileo remains primarily a civilian system with a limited secure service. Military satellite communications are uneven and depend on a mix of national assets and commercial providers, with gaps in redundancy. Earth observation satellites are sophisticated and often dual use, but too few in number to provide high revisit rates over contested areas. Most importantly, Europe has no operational constellation of its own for ballistic missile and hypersonic threat warning and instead depends on US early warning data. Projects such as Odin’s Eye and the Franco German JEWEL demonstrator aim to create the basis for an indigenous early warning capacity, but they are still at a developmental stage.
A final and rapidly evolving area is the emerging “combat cloud”, the fusion of data from many sensors, manned and unmanned, across air, land, sea and space. As European forces introduce more platforms, it becomes crucial to process and share information securely in real time under conditions of severe electronic interference. In this field, the main gaps concern software, doctrine and data governance rather than airframes or satellites. National and EU level projects are underway, and the planned Franco German Spanish Future Combat Air System places a networked system of systems at its core. For now, however, most European air operations still rest on a patchwork of national networks and US centric architectures.
In plain terms, Europe can generate impressive fighter fleets, but without a sharp increase in ISR capacity, tanker and AEW assets, air defence, munitions stocks and space based services, it cannot fully convert higher spending into autonomous high end air power that could deter Russia on its own. The shortfall is manageable as long as the US backbone remains in place, but it becomes much more uncomfortable in any scenario where Washington is preoccupied elsewhere or subject to domestic constraints.
Maritime power: apparent strength, underlying limits
At sea, Europe appears relatively well positioned. When one aggregates the major navies of France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic states, the result is a capable force of surface and submarine units that clearly outmatches the Russian Navy in the European theatre. The Ifri report notes that European surface ships enjoy both numerical and qualitative advantages in key areas, particularly anti ship missiles and anti submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea.
The detail, however, is less reassuring. To begin with, Europe’s carrier and amphibious capacity is modest. France’s Charles de Gaulle, the British Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, Italy’s Cavour and Trieste and Spain’s Juan Carlos together provide only a small number of flight decks, and not all are available at the same time once refits and crewing constraints are taken into account. The ability to deploy even two fully equipped carrier or large deck groups at once is not assured. The most critical elements of carrier effectiveness, from fixed wing aircraft to airborne early warning, also remain heavily dependent on US designs and technology. The F 35B that equips British and Italian decks is American. The French carrier operates US built E 2 Hawkeye aircraft and uses catapults based on US design. Europe has no equivalent to the EA 18G Growler for offensive electronic warfare at sea.
European surface escorts are also often less heavily armed than their American or Chinese counterparts. A typical European frigate or destroyer carries fewer vertical launch cells than an Arleigh Burke destroyer or a Type 055 cruiser. This limits the number of air defence and strike missiles that can be embarked and reduces flexibility in extended operations. European navies retain high standards, particularly in sensors and anti submarine warfare, but have often chosen to keep missile loads low in order to contain costs.
In long range maritime patrol and anti submarine aviation, dependence is again marked. The P 8 Poseidon has become the platform of choice for several key European navies after the retirement of older P 3 and Nimrod aircraft. Only France maintains an indigenous patrol capability with its modernised Atlantique 2 fleet, and Paris is now considering an Airbus A321 based future maritime patrol aircraft that would require partners to achieve economic scale.
There are areas of clear advantage. European navies have invested heavily over decades in mine countermeasures and now lead in the integration of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles into mine hunting and seabed infrastructure protection. Joint projects such as the French British Belgian drone based mine countermeasures system and German plans for large unmanned surface vessels suggest that a growing share of hazardous naval tasks will be performed by remote platforms.
As in other domains, however, the main problems lie in sustainability rather than in the front line platforms themselves. Crews are in short supply across most navies. Maintenance backlogs restrict the number of ships that are actually deployable. Stocks of anti ship and air defence missiles are limited and often shared between naval and land based units. Strategic sealift and the capacity to escort convoys under threat are underdeveloped. None of these weaknesses is impossible to fix, but all require sustained investment in personnel and support infrastructure as well as in new ships.
The industrial and fiscal test: EDIP, ReArm Europe and the politics of scale
The most revealing feature of the current moment is the recognition that sustaining high intensity war fighting is, above all, an industrial challenge. In 2022 and 2023, Europe learned that its ammunition plants, missile factories and heavy equipment lines could not easily move from boutique output to the volumes demanded by Ukraine and by Europe’s own plans to rebuild stocks. Russian forces expended in a few days what some European production lines delivered in months.
That shock lies behind the new EU defence tools. EDIP is intended to tackle three entrenched problems at once: fragmented demand, production facilities that are too small to benefit from economies of scale and supply chains that depend heavily on non European components. The political agreement to cap the share of third country components in EDIP funded projects at thirty five percent signals that the logic of strategic de risking has moved from the field of screening foreign investment into the centre of defence industrial policy.
At the same time, officials in both NATO and the EU have tried to avoid turning this approach into a broad “Buy European” rule. The NATO Secretary General’s warnings about excluding non EU allies from EDIP reflect real concerns in Washington and London that industrial policy might fracture the alliance at precisely the wrong moment. The emerging compromise in Brussels is pragmatic. It gives preference to European suppliers where they already exist or can be scaled up without excessive delay, while keeping cooperation open for critical technologies, particularly in space, cyber, nuclear systems and advanced enabling capabilities.
The budgetary environment remains harsh. Raising defence spending from around two percent of GDP toward three and a half percent or more by 2035 will be challenging even for relatively affluent states. For heavily indebted countries such as Italy, doubling defence budgets could push public debt ratios back toward the peaks seen during the pandemic. Recent analysis in the financial press illustrates the dilemma. Governments promise to meet NATO targets while simultaneously assuring voters that social spending will not be cut, a set of commitments that may prove difficult to reconcile.
If these financial paths are to be sustainable, European leaders must be able to show that higher defence funding does more than pay foreign suppliers. This is where EDIP and the broader ReArm Europe effort can influence domestic politics. If defence spending supports local employment, technological spillovers and export oriented industrial clusters, it will be easier to defend in parliaments. If, instead, extra funds vanish into ill coordinated national projects and imports that compete with domestic priorities, the stage will be set for a populist backlash.
The Ifri autonomy study is useful here because it underlines that capability autonomy is not simply a question of owning factories. It involves control over full industrial cycles, from design and development to maintenance, in selected sectors, while accepting manageable dependencies in others. Europe does not need a home grown version of every US system. It does need to decide where it intends to remain sovereign, where it will participate as a co producer and where it will live with dependence backed by political hedging.
That choice demands hard prioritisation. Three obvious candidates for sovereign or near sovereign capacity are land combat systems and ammunition, given their centrality to deterring and defeating Russian forces, key segments of air and missile defence, and the digital infrastructure that underpins command, control and intelligence in the European theatre. Nuclear deterrence, the most advanced space systems and global power projection appear more realistic candidates for continued reliance on US leadership for at least the next decade. Between these extremes lies a wide zone in which transatlantic co development makes sense, but only if Europe negotiates from a position of industrial strength rather than as a fragmented market.
Strategic outlook: what success would actually look like by 2035
If today’s decisions are carried through with reasonable discipline, what kind of European hard power could exist by the middle of the next decade?
On land, one can imagine a NATO Europe that fields several fully equipped heavy corps along its eastern flank, with integrated divisional artillery, strong engineering and bridging capabilities, modern air defence from very short to medium range, and organic ISR and electronic warfare elements in every brigade. Stocks of artillery shells, rockets and anti tank weapons would be sized for months of intense combat rather than a few weeks. Drones and loitering munitions would be as common in European brigades as they are in Ukrainian formations today. Transport routes from ports such as Rotterdam to the Baltic region and the Black Sea would be upgraded to move heavy units at speed.
In the air and space domain, a plausible positive trajectory would see Europe operating a mix of modern fourth and fifth generation fighters linked through a combat cloud that fuses data from national and NATO sensors, supported by enough tanker and AEW platforms to sustain several continuous air operations over the eastern flank without tapping US assets from other theatres. Reserves of guided munitions would be sufficient to support extended high tempo operations. European or closely controlled space systems would provide secure communications, high frequency imaging and at least a basic independent input to missile early warning.
At sea, European navies would maintain at least their present qualitative lead over Russia in the North Atlantic, the Baltic and the Mediterranean, while broadening their use of unmanned systems for mine warfare, anti submarine tasks and the protection of seabed infrastructure. At any given time, a small number of carrier and amphibious groups would be available, even if full autonomy in carrier aviation remained unlikely. The primary focus would remain the protection of sea lines of communication, particularly for reinforcement and resupply, in the face of missile and submarine threats.
Most crucially, the industrial base behind these forces would be organised for rapid expansion. Shell and missile plants would be capable of increasing output quickly under pre agreed contracts. Production of munitions and critical components would be dispersed across several locations to reduce vulnerability to local shocks. EDIP and successor initiatives would have created meaningful cross border industrial clusters rather than a loose collection of lightly coordinated national champions.
This outlook is demanding but not unrealistic. It assumes that defence spending settles at levels clearly above two percent of GDP across Europe, that EU investment schemes are implemented rather than constantly redesigned, and that the lessons of the war in Ukraine remain influential even if media attention shifts. It also presumes that centrist political forces in key states can resist narratives that portray defence as an optional luxury imposed from Brussels.
The main dangers are political and strategic rather than technical. A sharper US retrenchment than currently signalled would shorten timelines and expose immediate gaps, especially in air and missile defence and in intelligence. A serious economic downturn could push governments to cut defence budgets, particularly in southern Europe. Persistent disagreements within the EU over industrial protectionism versus openness to US and other partners could delay joint programmes or provoke countermeasures from Washington. If the war in Ukraine ended in a way that looked like a Russian gain, public support for long term rearmament could weaken as fear gives way to resignation.
There is also the question of how Russia will evolve. Moscow is already tightening its defence relationships with China, Iran and North Korea. Russian industry is learning to work around sanctions, even if at higher cost and with lower quality in some sectors. Europe cannot assume that Russian conventional power will simply fade. Capability autonomy is not a fixed destination, but a moving objective in a contest with an adversary that is itself adapting under pressure.
Yet the basic strategic logic is now clear. Russian hostility, the US move toward burden shifting and new EU level industrial instruments have brought Europe’s long holiday from hard power to a close. Capability autonomy will not mean dissolving NATO or matching the United States system for system. It will mean ensuring that Europeans can keep Russia deterred and contained in their own neighbourhood even if American support is partial, slow or constrained by domestic politics. That is a narrow definition of success, but a vital one.
Judged by that standard, Europe is no longer at the starting line. Budgets have risen, industrial strategies are on paper, and a serious argument about priorities has begun. What remains is the disciplined focus required to turn a crowded list of initiatives into a coherent order of battle that addresses the most important gaps first. If European governments can do that, the phrase “European pillar of NATO” will shift from a reassuring metaphor to a practical description of how responsibilities are shared in a more dangerous world.
