In March 2025, the European Commission unveiled Readiness 2030 — hastily rebranded from “ReArm Europe” after Italy and Spain objected to the militaristic name — pledging €800 billion in defence mobilisation. €650 billion unlocked by suspending EU budget rules to let member states increase defence spending. €150 billion in loans for joint defence projects. The most ambitious peacetime defence initiative the EU had ever attempted. 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 exhausted their ammunition stocks within weeks and had to purchase replacements, at cost, from American reserves. 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 — against what Carnegie Europe called “one of the weakest militaries in the world,” a country with no navy worth naming, no functioning air force, and no allies — was enough to expose a European military-industrial base that couldn’t sustain even a modest air operation.
€800 billion. And they couldn’t bomb Libya for a month.
What follows isn’t about whether Europe should rearm. That argument is over. It’s about what replacement actually requires — measured not in pledges and summit communiqués but in factory throughput, command architecture, political calendars, and the specific material constraints of producing a 155mm artillery shell — and why the timelines being discussed in European capitals are almost certainly insufficient by any serious strategic measure.
The subsidy nobody called a subsidy
For seven decades, the United States underwrote European security and charged it to the current account. The arrangement carried various names — extended deterrence, the transatlantic bargain, the security umbrella — but its economic logic was simple. America provided the military backbone of European defence. Europe spent the savings on other things.
The spending arc is unambiguous. NATO’s European members spent roughly 2.5% of combined GDP on defence at the end of the Cold War. By 2014, EU-27 defence expenditure had fallen to 1.1% of GDP — a trough not seen since the alliance’s founding. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, bottomed out at 1.12% in 2015. The Council on Foreign Relations estimated in 2024 that the cumulative savings from this post–Cold War decline, across NATO’s European membership, totalled approximately €1.8 trillion.
That €1.8 trillion wasn’t sitting in a reserve fund waiting to be redirected. It was capitalised — built into the load-bearing walls of European governance. Pension obligations that assumed defence spending would stay low. Healthcare systems expanded during decades of fiscal room. Education budgets, social housing programmes, transport infrastructure, the fiscal architecture of European integration itself. When Germany’s defence budget declined from roughly 3% of GDP in the late 1980s to barely above 1% by the mid-2000s, the savings didn’t vanish. They were absorbed into the welfare state and the economic logic of reunification. France folded its peace dividend into its system of social protection — one of the most generous in the developed world, consuming roughly 31% of GDP. The pattern replicated across the continent: the money not spent on defence became the money spent on everything that European voters actually care about.
The Stability and Growth Pact — designed in the 1990s, when EU defence spending was near its post-war floor — hardwired deficit ceilings that treated military expenditure as a residual claim on public finances, not a structural commitment. The eurozone’s fiscal logic was calibrated for a world in which serious defence spending was someone else’s problem. And for thirty years, it was. Governments didn’t choose to underspend on defence each year. The fiscal system was built to underspend on defence by default.
“Spend more on defence” understates the problem so badly it borders on dishonest. The peace dividend wasn’t discretionary spending that can be reallocated by ministerial decree. It became structural — woven into the commitments that define the social contract between European governments and their populations. Reversing it doesn’t mean finding new money for tanks and ammunition. It means cutting the social programmes that underpin every European government’s domestic political legitimacy — the pensions, the healthcare, the education funding that hold coalition agreements together and keep governments in office. No prime minister in a proportional-representation parliament volunteers for that conversation. Not when the opposition can campaign on “they cut your pension to buy missiles.” Not when the voters whose pensions are being cut have spent their entire adult lives in a Europe where the Americans paid for security and everyone understood that to be permanent.
The United States said so publicly. Robert Gates, in his farewell address as Secretary of Defence 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 the bluntest farewell a Defence Secretary had ever delivered to allied capitals.
It changed nothing. Europe acknowledged the warning and went back to spending 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, this was it — the first military seizure of sovereign territory in Europe since 1945. The 2014 Wales Summit produced the 2% pledge, NATO’s attempt to formalise what Gates had been demanding. Every ally solemnly committed to moving toward spending 2% of GDP on defence within a decade.
By 2024, a full ten years after the pledge, still only a handful of members had reached it. Most of the continent’s largest economies — the ones whose budgets actually matter — had not. The majority treated the target the way European governments treat most external commitments: acknowledged at the summit, referenced in subsequent speeches, and quietly subordinated to domestic spending priorities the moment the cameras left.
Cold War baselines
The post–Cold War spending norm of 1–2% of GDP isn't the historical baseline. It's the aberration. During the Cold War, NATO's European members routinely spent 3–5% of GDP on defence. Britain spent approximately 5% through the 1960s and 1970s. Germany and France each spent roughly 3% through the 1980s. What Europe now considers normal defence spending is what the Cold War generation would have called negligent.Budgets authorise spending. But factories produce capability. And the factories were among the first things the peace dividend dismantled.
The factory floor
Grant, for argument’s sake, that the money materialises. That European governments somehow find the political will to cut pension growth or healthcare budgets or education spending enough to double or triple their defence outlays. The next problem is harder, and it is physical: you cannot buy what does not exist to be manufactured.
European defence-industrial capacity atrophied deliberately over three decades of underinvestment. Rebuilding it involves bottlenecks that no appropriation bill can instantly resolve. Three are critical.
The first is ammunition. European production of 155mm artillery shells — the basic currency of land warfare — was negligible before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By January 2024, the continent had surged capacity to approximately one million rounds per year. The EU’s ASAP initiative targeted two million rounds annually by 2025 — a sixfold increase from 2022 levels, and a genuine industrial accomplishment. Nowhere near enough. Russia produces an estimated 4.2 million artillery shells per year. The Atlas Institute for International Affairs calculated that in just the first three months of 2024, Russia produced what NATO produced in an entire year. NATO’s own 2026 target of 267,000 rounds per month is designed to achieve mere parity with Russia’s estimated 250,000 per month — parity, not superiority, against a single adversary, assuming no other contingency demands ammunition at the same time.
The deepest sub-bottleneck is explosives. Europe’s entire TNT production capacity is concentrated in a single facility: Nitro-Chem, in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The sole remaining major TNT plant in all of NATO — down from seven during the Cold War. Its output of 10,000 metric tonnes per year is already committed under long-term contracts, including a $310 million deal to supply the US military, leaving no surplus for new European orders. A second Nitro-Chem production line will eventually double output, but completion is three to four years away. A new Swedish plant is also under development. ASAP allocated three-quarters of its total programme budget to powder and explosives — €248 million for powder, €124 million for explosives — because this is where the constraint binds hardest.
The second bottleneck is air defence. NATO Admiral Pierre Vandier has warned that new Patriot battery deliveries could take approximately seven years. The allied demand queue exceeds 4,300 interceptor rounds — roughly seven years of output at current production rates. PAC-3 MSE interceptor production runs at about 620 units per year. That’s 1.7 per day. During the 2026 Iran conflict, coalition forces expended Patriot missiles at an estimated rate of 225 per day — a 132-to-1 ratio of consumption to production. The primary production bottleneck is Boeing’s seeker facility in Huntsville, Alabama: a single building, in a single American city, producing the critical component for the alliance’s most important ground-based air defence system. A framework agreement signed in January 2026 aims to triple production to 2,000 units per year, but that target won’t be reached until 2030 at the earliest. Europe, meanwhile, has no indigenous capability for terminal-phase or exo-atmospheric missile interception. None. It relies almost entirely on American-made or American-deployed systems.
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 4,500 of Germany’s motorway bridges require modernisation or replacement. Modern main battle tanks weigh over sixty tonnes. Many of those bridges can’t carry them. Meanwhile, the three Baltic states still operate on Russian broad-gauge rail, incompatible with Western European standard gauge. Rail Baltica — 870 kilometres of new standard-gauge track through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — was supposed to solve this. Its estimated cost has ballooned from €6 billion to over €20 billion. Poland’s deputy infrastructure minister has called the 2030 completion target “impossible,” suggesting 2040 is more realistic.
None of this is theoretical. The Libya campaign put numbers on it.
In seven months against Gaddafi, NATO flew roughly 9,700 strike sorties and expended over 7,600 precision-guided munitions — the total industrial effort required to sustain a modest air campaign against a country with no functioning air force. Europe nearly couldn’t manage it. The idea of sustaining comparable effort against Russia, which fires more artillery shells in a month than NATO’s European members can produce in a year, belongs to a different category of absurdity.
What does replacement actually cost?
Two major estimates frame the debate and they disagree significantly. The IISS, in its May 2025 report "Defending Europe Without the United States," calculated approximately $1 trillion over twenty-five years to replace key US conventional military capabilities in the Euro-Atlantic theatre — including 128,000 additional troops, space-based intelligence and surveillance, exo-atmospheric missile interception, and expanded air and maritime forces. The Kiel Institute's "Sparta 2.0" paper, published in May 2026, argues the figure is far lower: roughly €50 billion per year, or about 0.25% of European GDP, if spending targets specific capability gaps rather than full-spectrum replacement. The disagreement isn't just about numbers. It reflects a fundamental ambiguity about what "strategic autonomy" actually means — replicating everything the United States currently provides, or building the minimum viable independent capability. That question shapes every policy decision downstream, and nobody in Brussels has answered it.The command problem
Money can be appropriated. Factories can, eventually, be built. But NATO’s institutional architecture presents a dependency of a different kind — one that runs through how European militaries think, plan, communicate, and fight.
NATO’s command structure doesn’t merely include American leadership. It was designed around it, from the ground up, over seven decades. The alliance operates on US interoperability standards, US intelligence systems, US satellite communications, US planning processes. European forces were designed as modular components meant to slot into an American-led architecture — not as independent formations capable of planning and executing theatre-level operations on their own. The assumption, embedded in procurement cycles and training doctrines and career paths, was that the Americans would always be running the system. European generals trained to lead divisions and corps, not to command theatre-level campaigns. European intelligence agencies trained to contribute to American assessments, not to produce independent strategic pictures. European logistics planners trained to request American airlift, not to organise 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 IISS identified the missing capabilities plainly in its May 2025 report: Europe has no indigenous exo-atmospheric mid-course missile interception capability. It remains dependent on US space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for the enabling functions that make modern warfare possible — the satellites, the communications architecture, the real-time intelligence fusion that turns raw data into targeting solutions. European militaries plug into these American-owned systems. They contribute to them. They do not own them. And if the owner decides to unplug, the systems don’t work.
The operational record confirms this with a consistency that should embarrass anyone who uses the phrase “European defence” with a straight face.
Kosovo, 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 the majority of combat sorties, provided virtually all precision-strike capability, conducted virtually all suppression of enemy air defences, and supplied the intelligence architecture that made the campaign possible. European allies contributed aircraft. America ran the war.
Libya, 2011 — marketed in European capitals as proof that the continent could lead a military operation — depended on the US for, as Carnegie Europe documented, “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.” The operation that was supposed to demonstrate European military autonomy demonstrated the opposite.
France’s Operation Serval in Mali in January 2013 — the example most frequently cited to demonstrate European operational independence — required US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft and AFRICOM aerial refuelling to function. American C-17s flew over 120 sorties in the operation’s first weeks, transporting nearly 1,500 French troops and 2,400 tonnes of cargo into Mali. Without American airlift, the most independent European military operation since Suez couldn’t have deployed.
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.
The pattern across every significant European military operation since 1956 — Kosovo, Libya, Mali, the Falklands — is the same: not one has been conducted without, at minimum, American logistical, intelligence, or enabling support. Not a single one. The most independent European military action in seventy years still needed American transport planes to get to the fight.
This isn’t a gap that more money fills automatically. The command architecture, the intelligence systems, the space-based infrastructure — these aren’t products you order from a catalogue. They represent decades of accumulated institutional knowledge, technological development, and operational practice. The United States didn’t build this architecture in a decade. Europe won’t replicate it in one either.
Institutions can be restructured, given time and political commitment. But the dependency runs deeper than org charts and procurement contracts. It lives in how an entire continent’s defence establishments have thought about strategy for seventy years — and in the political systems that sustain them.
Strategic culture and the problem of seventy years
The Suez Crisis of 1956 broke something in European 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. They had the political will. What they didn’t have was American permission. And the United States — not the Soviet Union, which also objected — killed the operation. Eisenhower threatened to dump sterling reserves and block IMF loans to Britain. The pound collapsed. Within days, London and Paris withdrew in humiliation. The lesson was devastating, and it was absorbed not as a policy conclusion to be debated in future white papers but as a reflex. An involuntary flinch. Without American backing, or at absolute minimum American acquiescence, significant military operations were off the table. Full stop.
That reflex embedded itself in bureaucracies, training doctrines, procurement decisions, and institutional memory across an entire generation of European defence professionals. Careers were built around it. Ministries were organised around it. The generation that came after — the Cold War officer corps — inherited a system already structured around American primacy and never questioned it, because it worked. Seventy years later, the reflex remains operative across most of the continent’s defence establishments. Not as a conscious strategic choice anyone articulates or defends in public. As the default setting of systems that have never needed to operate differently, and don’t know how to begin.
The political arithmetic makes the timeline brutally 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. The required increases from 2024 baselines are extraordinary by any peacetime standard. Belgium must increase its defence burden by 282%. Spain by 249%. Italy by 211%. Germany by 164%. France — France, which has the largest military in Western Europe and considers itself a serious strategic power — by 144%.
Consider what these numbers mean in practice. Germany needs to more than double its defence spending as a share of GDP by 2035 — while simultaneously maintaining pension commitments to an ageing population, funding the energy transition, and managing the fiscal aftermath of reunification that still shapes German public finances thirty-five years later. 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. But the Sondervermögen is already largely committed, and the Bundeswehr’s own procurement system, notorious for cost overruns and multi-year delays, struggles to convert money into deployed capability efficiently. And Germany’s is the easiest case among the large Western European economies, because at least Berlin has acknowledged the problem publicly. Spain, which secured a formal exemption from the 5% target, has not.
These aren’t marginal adjustments. They 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 — infrastructure, R&D, cyber, mobility corridors. Spain secured a formal exemption, arguing it could meet all NATO obligations at approximately 2.1% of GDP. National roadmaps were due by mid-2026 with a collective progress review in 2029. The fundamental critique is straightforward: spending targets measure effort, not capability. Money in does not equal military output.The eastern flank complicates this picture — honestly. Poland now spends 4.48% of GDP on defence, the highest rate in the alliance, and devotes 54.4% of its defence budget to equipment procurement. Lithuania spends 4.00%. Latvia 3.73%. Estonia 3.38%. These states have demonstrated exactly the sustained political commitment missing elsewhere on the continent. And that concession matters.
But it sharpens the verdict rather than softening it. Poland’s GDP is roughly one-fifth of Germany’s. The three Baltic states combined have an economy smaller than Denmark’s. Finland’s population is 5.5 million. These countries can arm themselves with extraordinary conviction — and they are, at rates that put Western Europe to shame — but they cannot build the integrated European command structure, the continental air-defence umbrella, or the defence-industrial base that strategic autonomy requires. They don’t have the factories, the population, or the economic mass. The states willing to spend at the required level are too small to build continental-scale defence infrastructure. The economies large enough to matter — Germany, France, Italy, Spain — have moved slowest. That asymmetry is the structural fact no amount of eastern European determination can overcome alone. Warsaw can spend 4.48% until the treasury runs dry and it will not produce an integrated European air defence system. Only Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Madrid can do that, and they haven’t started.
The timeline mismatch is the sharpest edge of this entire argument. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned publicly that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years. Defence intelligence assessments from multiple NATO capitals place the window for a potential Russian threat to the Baltic states at two to five years after the end of hostilities in Ukraine. 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 not alarmist projections from think-tank analysts looking for attention. They are assessments from serving military officials with access to classified intelligence.
The Hague Commitment’s deadline for reaching 5% is 2035. Ten years from now. The gap between the threat timeline and the capability timeline is the central strategic fact of European security. And every layer of this argument — fiscal, industrial, institutional, cultural — makes that gap wider.
Can Europe close it? Perhaps. Given enough time, enough political will, enough sustained commitment across enough electoral cycles. But there’s a harder question, and it’s the one this article has been building toward: 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 sends a signal — to adversaries, to allies, to domestic populations — that the guarantee is conditional. And a conditional guarantee is an invitation to test it.
This isn’t abstract game theory. It describes, with uncomfortable precision, the strategic position of the Baltic states in 2026.
Every summit announcement about European strategic autonomy, every new defence programme designed to reduce dependence on Washington, every Readiness 2030 press release — each one simultaneously communicates two things. To European audiences: we are taking responsibility for our own security. To Moscow: the Americans may not come.
The first message is intended. The second is unavoidable. And the second is the one that shapes Russian risk calculations. A rational actor in the Kremlin — and Russian strategic planners have been many things, but irrational about military opportunity is not one of them — watches European rearmament not for what it produces today but for what it reveals about the alliance’s cohesion. A Europe that is building alternatives to American protection is a Europe that doubts American protection. And doubt, in deterrence theory, is not a neutral condition. It is an invitation.
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’s “Sparta 2.0” paper suggests partial operational independence in three to five years, comprehensive autonomy in five to ten, and full capabilities — including sixth-generation fighter aircraft and integrated continental air defence — in ten or more years. These are serious estimates from credible institutions. And even the most optimistic reading leaves a multi-year window during which deterrence rests on a guarantee whose credibility is actively degrading.
What makes this dangerous rather than merely inconvenient is the geography.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have a combined population of roughly six million. Their conventional military forces, despite recent growth, remain token-sized relative to the threat they face. Their terrain is flat and narrow, bordered by Russia to the east and Belarus to the south, offering no defensive depth. There are no mountain ranges to channel an advance, no wide rivers to serve as natural barriers, no strategic rear area to fall back to. Their territory, from border to coast, can be crossed in hours.
Their security has always depended on the credibility of a rapid NATO reinforcement — the assurance that an attack on Tallinn or Riga or Vilnius would trigger, within days, the full weight of allied military power. Not a measured response. Not a proportional escalation. The full weight. 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, 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 currently replicate that commitment. Not in scale. Not in speed. Not in political credibility. The German Bundeswehr has stationed a permanent brigade in Lithuania — 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.
During the transition period — however long it lasts — six million people inhabit a deterrence gap that their own governments cannot close. The European rearmament process, if it succeeds, will eventually fill that gap. But “eventually” provides no security to populations living on geography that rewards speed, mass, and surprise, and punishes defenders who need weeks to mobilise a response. The paradox is inescapable: the very act of building the capability to close the gap may be widening it, because every step toward replacing the American guarantee signals that the guarantee needs replacing.
The question isn’t whether the guarantee is still credible in some formal, treaty-text sense. Of course it is. Article 5 remains on the books. The question is whether an adversary calculating risk in Moscow believes it is — 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. It hasn’t gotten smaller. But beneath it lie five layers of structure that no spending figure can dissolve: a peace dividend embedded too deep to reverse by budget decree, an industrial base too atrophied to rebuild in time, command systems designed around American leadership, a strategic culture shaped by seventy years of outsourced responsibility, and a transition in which building alternatives undermines the guarantee they are meant to replace.
The evidence across all five layers supports a timeline of ten to fifteen years for meaningful European strategic autonomy. That timeline assumes sustained political commitment of a kind no European coalition government has yet demonstrated the capacity to maintain across a single electoral cycle, let alone the three or four consecutive ones the project demands. It assumes defence-industrial expansion currently bottlenecked by one TNT plant in Poland, one seeker facility in Alabama, and production lines for interceptors the continent lacks. It assumes institutional transformation at a speed that seventy years of path dependency has not prepared anyone to achieve.
The real question isn’t whether Europe will rearm. Europe is rearming. The real question is whether it will rearm fast enough.
The honest answer, based on everything the evidence shows, is almost certainly not.
Six million people in the Baltic states live inside that answer. Their borders are flat. Their armies are small. Their geography offers nowhere to retreat to. The security architecture that protected them for three decades is being dismantled faster than anything is being built to replace it. They know this. Their governments say so, and spend accordingly, and it isn’t enough — because the problem isn’t the Baltics. The problem is everyone else.
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Beberapa konten halaman ini dibuat dan/atau diedit dengan bantuan AI Generatif.
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Key Sources and References
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NATO, The Hague Summit Declaration, June 24-25, 2025. https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2025/06/25/the-hague-summit-declaration
Mark Rutte, keynote speech, Munich Security Conference event, Berlin, December 11, 2025. NATO transcript. https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/2025/12/11/keynote-speech-by-nato-secretary-general-mark-rutte-and-moderated-discussion-with-the-minister-for-foreign-affairs-of-germany-johann-wadephul
Euronews, “Ready for war in 2029: Is a Russian attack on NATO a real possibility?,” December 3, 2025. https://www.euronews.com/2025/12/03/ready-for-war-in-2029-is-a-russian-attack-on-nato-a-real-possibility
Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, “Europe Can Achieve Strategic Autonomy in the Coming 10-15 Years,” German Marshall Fund, interview with Die Presse, May 28, 2026. https://www.gmfus.org/news/europe-can-achieve-strategic-autonomy-coming-10-15-years
Intereconomics, “Can Europe Deliver NATO’s Five Percent?,” Vol. 61, No. 2, 2026. https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2026/number/2/article/can-europe-deliver-nato-s-five-percent.html
Railway Gazette International, “Baltic States: 2030 delivery in question for restructured Rail Baltica project.” https://www.railwaygazette.com/in-depth/baltic-states-tight-timeline-sparks-rail-baltica-rethink/69758.article
Ulfur Atli
Writing mainly on the topics of science, defense and technology.
Space technologies are my primary interest.
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