In March 2025, the European Commission unveiled ReArm Europe, a plan to mobilise up to €800 billion for defence. Within weeks it had been renamed Readiness 2030, after Italy and Spain objected to the militaristic name. Up to €650 billion would come from letting member states activate the national escape clause in the EU’s fiscal rules and spend more on defence; another €150 billion would come as EU loans for joint defence procurement. It was the most ambitious peacetime defence initiative the EU had ever attempted, and the number was large enough to dominate headlines for a week.
Fourteen years earlier, NATO went to war against Libya. Within a month, the alliance was running short of precision bombs. Only eight of twenty-eight members contributed combat forces. Most of those eight ran out of munitions and had to buy more, at cost, from American stockpiles. European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the weapon of choice in a modern air campaign, were depleted so fast that by mid-April 2011, less than four weeks into operations, officials were openly questioning whether the campaign could continue without deeper American involvement. The seven-month war against Muammar Gaddafi was fought against a country with no navy worth naming and no allies, whose forces an essay published by Carnegie Europe called “one of the weakest militaries in the world.”
That campaign was enough to expose a European military-industrial base that couldn’t sustain even a modest air operation. Europe now plans to mobilise up to €800 billion for defence, and whether it should rearm is no longer in dispute.
What matters is what that money can buy, and that depends on factory throughput, command architecture, political calendars and the specific material constraints of producing a 155mm artillery shell. By those measures, the timelines being discussed in European capitals are almost certainly insufficient.
The subsidy nobody called a subsidy
For most of NATO’s history, the United States underwrote European security and Europe paid only part of the bill. The arrangement went by various names, among them extended deterrence, the transatlantic bargain and the security umbrella, but its economic logic was simple. America provided the military backbone of European defence. Europe spent the savings on other things.
At the end of the Cold War, NATO’s European members spent roughly 2.5% of combined GDP on defence. By 2014, measured on the EU’s own accounting basis, which runs below NATO’s, EU-27 defence expenditure had fallen to 1.1% of GDP, the low point of the post–Cold War era. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, bottomed out at about 1.1% in 2015. Measured against NATO’s 2% guideline, the cumulative savings for NATO’s European members since 1991 came to an estimated €1.8 trillion.
That money never sat in a reserve fund waiting to be redirected. It was spent, year by year, elsewhere in the budget, or never raised in taxes at all: pension obligations that assumed defence spending would stay low, healthcare systems expanded during decades of fiscal room, education budgets, social housing programmes, transport infrastructure and the fiscal architecture of European integration itself. When Germany’s defence budget declined from about 2.5% of GDP in the late 1980s to barely above 1% by the mid-2000s, the savings helped pay for the welfare state and for reunification. France folded its peace dividend into its system of social protection, the most generous in the EU, consuming roughly a third of GDP. Across the continent, the room left by low defence budgets filled up with the welfare programmes European voters had come to expect.
The Stability and Growth Pact, agreed in 1997 while defence budgets were still falling, set deficit and debt ceilings that made no distinction between a tank and a pension. Within those limits, military spending had to compete every year with every domestic claim on the budget, in a eurozone that assumed serious defence was someone else’s problem. For most of three decades that assumption held, and low defence budgets rarely had to be defended.
“Spend more on defence” understates the problem. Over three decades the peace dividend turned into commitments that define the social contract between European governments and their populations, and no ministerial decree can reallocate them. Reversing it means raising taxes, borrowing more, or taking the money for tanks and ammunition out of the pensions, healthcare and education funding that hold coalition agreements together and keep governments in office. Borrowing is the least painful of the three, and Europe’s most indebted governments have the least room for it. No prime minister in a proportional-representation parliament volunteers for the other two while the opposition can campaign against cutting pensions to buy missiles. Most European voters have spent their entire adult lives in a Europe where the Americans paid for security, and few expected that to change.
The United States said so publicly. Robert Gates, in his final policy speech as US Secretary of Defense, in Brussels on June 10, 2011, warned of “the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the transatlantic alliance.” He described a two-tiered alliance in which a shrinking number of members bore a growing share of the burden while the rest free-rode on American willingness to pay. The speech was among the bluntest any Defense Secretary had delivered to allied capitals. EU governments acknowledged the warning and kept spending about 1.2% of GDP on defence.
Three years later, Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. If anything was going to shock European governments into spending, it was the first annexation of a European state’s territory by force since 1945. That year’s Wales Summit produced the 2% pledge, NATO’s attempt to formalise what Gates had been demanding. Every ally committed to moving toward that level of defence spending within a decade.
For most of that decade, only a handful of members met it. As late as 2023, just ten did: the United States, Britain, Greece and a cluster of northern and eastern allies closer to Russia, while Germany, France, Italy and Spain fell short. The majority treated the target the way European governments treat most external commitments: acknowledged at the summit, referenced in subsequent speeches, and subordinated to domestic spending priorities the moment the cameras left. Only in 2024, with Russian troops deep inside Ukraine, did NATO forecast that 23 of its 32 members would finally reach it, and revised figures published a year later put the 2024 count at 18. By NATO’s estimates, every ally finally reached it in 2025.
Cold War baselines
By Cold War standards, the post–Cold War norm of 1–2% of GDP is the aberration. During the Cold War, NATO's European members routinely spent 3–5% of GDP on defence. Britain spent 6–7% of GDP in the early 1960s and around 5% through the 1970s. France spent about 3% through the 1980s, and West Germany between 2.5% and 3%.Money also has to be turned into weapons, and the factories that did that were among the first things the peace dividend dismantled.
The factory floor
Suppose the money materialises, and European governments find the taxes, borrowing or budget cuts to double or triple their defence outlays. The money still has to buy things the continent’s factories cannot yet make in the quantities needed.
European defence-industrial capacity atrophied deliberately over three decades of underinvestment. Rebuilding it runs into three bottlenecks that no appropriation bill can quickly resolve.
The first is ammunition. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European production of 155mm artillery shells, the basic currency of land warfare, was modest. The EU’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production set a target of two million rounds a year of production capacity by the end of 2025, almost a sixfold increase on 2022 levels. Russia’s shell output was estimated at about 250,000 rounds a month in 2024, and higher since. Even the roughly 267,000 rounds a month that the Atlas Institute for International Affairs projects for NATO in 2026, if it materialises, would only match Russia’s 2024 rate: parity with a single adversary, and only if no other contingency demands ammunition at the same time. In November 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance now produced more ammunition than Russia, but he gave no figures, and published estimates of Russian shell output still run above the West’s.
The tightest constraint within it is explosives. Europe has just one major TNT plant left: Nitro-Chem, in Bydgoszcz, Poland, down from seven as the Cold War ended. It makes about 10,000 tonnes a year, and a large slice of future output is already spoken for, including a contract signed in 2025 to supply 18,000 tons for US weapons programmes between 2027 and 2029. A second production line will double capacity, but it is three to four years from completion. In Sweden, Swebal is building the country’s first new TNT plant since the Cold War, due to start production in 2028. The EU’s ammunition act put three-quarters of its programme budget into powder and explosives, because this is where the constraint binds hardest.
The second bottleneck is air defence. NATO Admiral Pierre Vandier has warned that new Patriot batteries could take about seven years to arrive, and the allied queue for interceptors exceeds 4,300 rounds. PAC-3 MSE interceptors come off the line at about 620 a year. During the opening four days of the 2026 Iran war, coalition forces fired Patriot interceptors at an estimated 225 a day. The main production bottleneck is Boeing’s seeker facility in Huntsville, Alabama, one building that makes the critical component for the alliance’s most important ground-based air defence system. A framework agreement signed in January 2026 aims to more than triple capacity, to about 2,000 a year, by 2030. Europe, meanwhile, has only a thin layer of its own. The Franco-Italian SAMP/T system can engage short-range ballistic missiles in their final phase, but the continent has no indigenous exo-atmospheric interceptor. Its first European-owned upper-tier shield, Germany’s Arrow 3 battery, was declared operational in December 2025 and was bought from Israel. The upper-tier sites that already guarded the continent, the Aegis Ashore bases in Romania and Poland, are American, and most of the rest of the umbrella is American-made Patriot.
The third is logistics infrastructure. The Bundeswehr’s Operational Plan for Germany envisions up to 800,000 allied troops and 200,000 vehicles transiting through German territory and requiring supply within six months of a major conflict. Germany’s rail network, roads and bridges, degraded by decades of civilian underinvestment, are frequently incapable of handling heavy military transport. Roughly 4,000 bridge structures on Germany’s busiest motorway corridors need modernisation or replacement, and many of them can’t carry a modern main battle tank, which weighs over sixty tonnes.
Meanwhile, the Baltic states’ railways still run almost entirely on Russian broad gauge, incompatible with Western European standard gauge; the only standard-gauge link, completed in 2015, runs from the Polish border to Kaunas. Rail Baltica, a new standard-gauge line through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, was supposed to solve this. Its estimated cost has ballooned from €5.8 billion to €23.8 billion. In January 2026, the European Court of Auditors concluded that the line will not be finished by 2030: only a basic first phase is still targeted for that date, and there is no deadline at all for the full project.
The Libya campaign put numbers on all this. In seven months against Gaddafi, NATO aircraft flew more than 26,500 sorties, over 9,700 of them strike sorties. That was the total effort required to sustain a modest air campaign against a weak opponent. European air forces nearly couldn’t manage it; in Libya they ran short of bombs within a month. Against Russia, whose shell output alone runs into millions of rounds a year, comparable effort would be far beyond what Europe could sustain.
What would replacement cost?
Two major estimates frame the debate, and they differ less on the price than on the ambition. The IISS puts the cost of replacing key US conventional capabilities in Europe at about $1 trillion over twenty-five years, excluding nuclear deterrence as well as intelligence, space and cyber capabilities. That covers the roughly 128,000 US personnel Washington would commit to a major European war, plus air, maritime and enabling forces. The Kiel Institute prices targeted European autonomy across ten priority capability gaps at about €50 billion a year, roughly €500 billion over a decade or about 0.25% of European GDP, and argues that the bottleneck is political will rather than money. The real disagreement is over what "strategic autonomy" means: how much of what the United States currently provides Europe must replace, and how much it can do without. Brussels has yet to settle the question.The command problem
Even with the money found and the factories built, NATO’s institutional architecture would leave a dependency of a different kind, one that runs through how European militaries plan and fight.
NATO’s command structure was designed around American leadership, from the ground up, over seven decades. The alliance operates on US intelligence systems, US satellite communications, US planning processes. European forces were designed as modular components meant to slot into an American-led architecture rather than as independent formations capable of planning and executing theatre-level operations on their own. The assumption, built into procurement and training, was that the Americans would always be running the system. European officers have long led some of NATO’s joint headquarters, and in February 2026 allies agreed that Europeans will take over all three Joint Force Commands in the coming years, but the supreme command above them, and most of the intelligence and enablers they draw on, have stayed American. Intelligence agencies learned to contribute to American assessments instead of producing independent strategic pictures, and logistics planners to request American airlift instead of organising their own.
There is no European equivalent of US Central Command or US European Command — no unified combatant command capable of running a continent-scale campaign independently. The EU Military Staff exists, but it has no operational command authority comparable to what Washington fields. NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe has always been commanded by an American. The position is not, technically, reserved for a US officer. In practice, it has never been held by anyone else.
The missing capabilities are specific. Beyond the upper tier of missile defence, Europe depends on US space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for much of what makes modern warfare possible: satellite coverage, communications and the real-time intelligence fusion that turns raw data into targeting solutions. France flies its own reconnaissance, signals-intelligence and military communications satellites, and Britain, Germany and Italy run smaller national military satellite systems, but no European fleet approaches American scale. For the rest, European militaries plug into American-owned systems and contribute to them, but they do not own them, and the owner can switch them off.
The operational record bears this out, starting with Kosovo in 1999. The air campaign that NATO presents as its defining post–Cold War success was, in operational terms, an American war with European participation.
The United States flew about 60% of all sorties, carried out most of the strike missions and precision bombing, conducted the bulk of the suppression of enemy air defences, and supplied the intelligence architecture that made the campaign possible. Britain, France and Canada were among the few other allies that also dropped precision-guided weapons.
Libya in 2011 was marketed in European capitals as proof that the continent could lead a military operation. Steven Erlanger, the essay’s author, found that it depended on the US for “the initial stages, in particular the destruction of Libya’s air defenses” and for “intelligence, refueling, and more precision bombing than Paris or London want to acknowledge.”
France’s Operation Serval in Mali, launched in January 2013 and the example usually cited for French operational independence, leaned on US Air Force C-17 transport aircraft and AFRICOM aerial refuelling. In the first month alone, US aircraft flew 190 airlift sorties, carrying 1,480 French troops and 2,400 tons of cargo into Mali. France started the operation on its own; it needed American aircraft to build up and sustain the force.
Even the Falklands War of 1982, the campaign most often invoked to prove that a European power can still fight alone, depended on US satellite intelligence relayed through the Five Eyes partnership, the joint US-UK base at Ascension Island, and some 200 American AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles. Former US Navy Secretary John Lehman later stated that Britain “would have had to have withdrawn from the Falklands” without American support.
Across the major European military operations of recent decades, from the Falklands to Kosovo, Libya and Mali, the pattern is the same: each leaned on American logistical, intelligence, or enabling support.
More money will not fill this gap automatically. Command architecture, intelligence systems and space-based infrastructure can’t be ordered from a catalogue; they take decades of practice to build. The United States didn’t build this architecture in a decade, and Europe won’t replicate it in one either.
Institutions can be restructured, given time. Habits of strategic thought, and the political systems that sustain them, change more slowly.
Strategic culture and the problem of seventy years
The Suez Crisis of 1956 broke something in British and French strategic thinking that has never been repaired. Britain and France, at the time still major imperial powers with recent experience of large-scale military operations, attempted independent action to seize the Suez Canal after Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised it. They had the military capability and the political will but not American permission. The Soviet Union also objected, but it was the United States that killed the operation. As a run on sterling drained Britain’s reserves, Washington threatened to sell its sterling bonds and made clear it would block emergency IMF support until London accepted a ceasefire. Britain and France accepted a UN ceasefire on 6 November, and by 22 December their last troops had left in humiliation. Britain absorbed the lesson as a reflex, an involuntary flinch: without American backing, or at the very least American acquiescence, significant military operations were off the table. France drew the opposite conclusion, built its own nuclear force and in 1966 left NATO’s integrated military command, yet its conventional forces still came to lean on American support, as Mali would show.
Outside France, the reflex settled into the bureaucracies, doctrines and procurement plans of a generation of European defence professionals, and careers and ministries were organised around it. The Cold War officer corps that followed inherited a system already built around American primacy and had little reason to question it, because it worked. Seventy years later, the reflex survives in most of the continent’s defence establishments as a default setting that few defend in public as a strategic choice, in systems that have never needed to work differently.
The political arithmetic makes the timeline concrete. NATO’s Hague Commitment, adopted at the June 2025 summit, sets a target of 5% of GDP for defence and security spending by 2035. Counting the whole 5%, of which 3.5% is core defence, and measuring it against 2024 military spending alone, Belgium must increase its defence burden by 292% and Germany by 164%. Even France, which has the largest military in Western Europe and considers itself a serious strategic power, must raise it by 144%.
Consider what these numbers mean in practice. Even on the core 3.5% alone, Germany needs to raise its defence spending by well over half as a share of GDP by 2035, while maintaining pension commitments to an ageing population and funding the energy transition. Berlin passed a €100 billion special fund for defence in 2022 and amended its constitution to do it, and that was treated as a historic turning point. In March 2025 it went further, exempting defence spending above 1% of GDP from the constitutional debt brake, and it now plans to reach 3.5% of GDP by 2029. But the Bundeswehr’s procurement system, notorious for cost overruns and multi-year delays, still struggles to convert money into deployed capability efficiently. And Germany is the easiest case among the large Western European economies, because Berlin has at least rewritten its constitution to pay for the problem. Spain, which insists it can meet its NATO capability targets on about 2.1% of GDP, has not.
These are structural transformations of national budgets, to be achieved and sustained by coalition governments on four-year electoral cycles, governing populations that have spent three generations under social contracts premised on the assumption that serious military expenditure was unnecessary.
The Hague Commitment
The 5% target breaks down into 3.5% of GDP for core defence and 1.5% for broader security domains such as infrastructure, R&D, cyber and mobility corridors. Spain claims an exemption, citing a letter from Mark Rutte granting it "flexibility", and says it can meet all NATO capability targets at about 2.1% of GDP; NATO insists there are no opt-outs. Allies submit annual plans showing a credible path to the target, and the trajectory will be reviewed in 2029. Its weakness as a measure is that it counts what governments spend and says little about the capability that spending buys.The eastern flank complicates this picture. In 2025 Poland spent about 4.3% of GDP on defence, the highest share in the alliance, and it devotes more than half of its defence budget to equipment procurement. Lithuania spent 4%, Latvia 3.7% and Estonia 3.4%. These states have shown exactly the sustained political commitment missing elsewhere on the continent.
But the size of these countries shows the limits of that commitment. Poland’s GDP is roughly one-fifth of Germany’s. The three Baltic states combined have an economy smaller than Denmark’s. These countries are arming at rates well above Western Europe’s, but they cannot build the integrated European command structure, the continental air-defence umbrella or the defence-industrial base that strategic autonomy requires. They lack the economic mass. The states willing to spend at the required level are too small to build continental-scale defence infrastructure; Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the economies large enough to matter, have moved slowest. Warsaw can keep spending at one of the alliance’s highest rates until the treasury runs dry and on its own it will not produce an integrated European air defence system. Only Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid, together with London, can do that — and only Berlin has yet committed money on the necessary scale.
Rutte has warned publicly that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years. Denmark’s defence intelligence service estimated in early 2025 that, once Russia no longer had to fight in Ukraine, it could pose a regional threat to the Baltic states within about two years and be ready for a large-scale war in Europe within five, provided the United States stayed out and NATO did not rearm at the same pace. Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, Carsten Breuer, has stated that Russia could be militarily ready to attack NATO countries by 2029. These are assessments from serving officials with access to classified intelligence.
The Hague Commitment’s deadline for reaching 5% is 2035, less than a decade away. Rutte’s and Breuer’s threat timelines end this decade, and the Danish clock starts whenever the fighting in Ukraine stops; the capability timeline runs well past 2030, and every constraint above stretches it further.
Europe may close that gap, given enough time and enough electoral cycles of sustained commitment. The more urgent question is what happens while Europe tries.
The credibility paradox
The deterrence value of a security guarantee depends on it being perceived as unconditional. The moment the guaranteed party begins visibly building alternatives, it signals to adversaries, allies and domestic populations that the guarantee is conditional, which can give an adversary a reason to test it. The logic is abstract, but it fits the strategic position of the Baltic states in 2026 closely.
Each summit announcement about European strategic autonomy, and each new defence programme designed to reduce dependence on Washington, sends two messages at once. European audiences hear that Europe is taking responsibility for its own security. Moscow hears that the Americans may not come.
The first message is intended; the second is hard to avoid, and it may weigh more in Russian risk calculations. A rational planner in the Kremlin can read European rearmament for what it reveals about the alliance’s cohesion as well as for what it produces. NATO’s leadership makes the opposite case: that a Europe spending, producing and doing more is what keeps the alliance’s deterrence believable. Both effects can operate at once.
Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, president of the German Marshall Fund, estimated in May 2026 that Europe could achieve strategic autonomy in ten to fifteen years. The Kiel Institute suggests significant progress towards sovereignty within three to five years and a high degree of autonomy in most areas within five to ten. Even the most optimistic of these estimates leaves a multi-year window during which deterrence rests on a guarantee whose credibility is in question.
Geography raises the stakes. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have a combined population of roughly six million, and their conventional military forces, despite recent growth, remain token-sized relative to the threat they face.
Their territory is narrow, bordered by Russia to the east and Belarus to the south, and offers little defensive depth: rivers, lakes, forests and wetlands can slow an advance, but there are no mountain ranges to channel it and no strategic rear area to fall back to. In RAND wargames played against the forces NATO had in place in 2015, Russian units reached the outskirts of Tallinn or Riga within 60 hours at most.
Their security has always depended on the credibility of a rapid NATO reinforcement: the expectation that an attack on Tallinn or Riga or Vilnius would bring, within days, a large allied military response rather than a measured or token one. Article 5 leaves each ally to decide what action it takes. That assurance has historically rested on the United States, on American forces stationed in Europe, American logistics chains stretching back to bases in Germany and Poland, and an American political commitment to treat an attack on Estonia as an attack on Ohio. Remove the American element from that equation and what remains is a promise that no European military can currently honour at the speed the geography requires.
No European force can yet match that commitment. Germany is building a permanent armoured brigade in Lithuania, around 5,000 personnel at full strength by the end of 2027, and that is a meaningful step. But a brigade is not a deterrent against the kind of force Russia could mass on a three-day timeline. Deterrence at that scale requires the kind of rapid, overwhelming response capability that only the United States has fielded in Europe for the last three decades.
However long the transition lasts, the Baltic states live in a deterrence gap that their own governments cannot close. European rearmament, if it succeeds, will eventually fill it. But “eventually” offers little to populations on terrain that rewards a fast attacker and punishes defenders who need weeks to mobilise. Building the capability may also widen the gap for a while, if each step toward replacing the American guarantee is read as a sign that the guarantee needs replacing.
In a formal, treaty-text sense, the guarantee is still credible: Article 5 remains on the books. What matters is whether an adversary calculating risk in Moscow believes it, and whether that belief weakens a little more each time a European capital announces a programme explicitly designed to make American protection unnecessary.
The €800 billion is still there. What it cannot buy quickly is everything the money has to pass through: TNT plants, seeker factories, an upper tier of missile defence, a command able to run a continental campaign, and governments willing to keep paying through three or four consecutive elections.
The Baltic states bear that delay most directly. Their armies are small and their territory shallow. The security architecture that has protected them for two decades still rests on an American guarantee that Washington formally calls ironclad, and that Europe is now hedging against faster than it can replace. Baltic governments can spend, and do; the factories, air defences and command structures that would make up the difference have to come from the larger economies to their west.
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Media
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