Europe’s new Defence Readiness Roadmap: The European Commission bids for the driving seat

Between them, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have produced a new consensus among European states on the need to spend unprecedented sums in an emergency effort to bolster Europe’s defences. And Europeans now have a plan in front of them—the Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, produced jointly by the European Commission and the EU’s foreign policy chief, and in effect endorsed by the European Council summit on 23 October. Will it work?

The roadmap is strikingly comprehensive, and demanding. It builds on the EU’s defence white paper of the spring, reiterating the imperative to support and learn from Ukraine. It also reiterates the need to respond to the ways in which modern warfare has transformed in recent years, requiring matching transformations in defence capabilities and in Europe’s defence technological and industrial base. It emphasises the key capability priorities identified in the white paper, and proposes four initial flagship projects—the Eastern Flank Watch, incorporating a specific European Drone Defence Initiative; a European Air Shield; and a European Space Shield. All reflect the strategic imperatives of: moving from platform-centric defence thinking to high-tech, AI-enabled, networked systems stitching together missiles, robots and surveillance assets; forward defence; and European cooperation to achieve “an independent interoperable strategic capacity”.

The overall approach reprises some familiar themes. Member states must pool their efforts and resources. Urgent action is needed to form Capability Coalitions to fill key gaps. There must be a step-change in levels of joint procurement (to 40% of investment spend by 2027). National protectionism should give way to “a true EU-wide market for defence equipment”. Industry must be quicker on its feet—more innovation and rapid iteration, an opening up to non-traditional suppliers. And more spending should stay within the EU (a target of 55% of procurement)—to benefit the economy and industry, and to reflect the fact that “those that develop their own technologies will be the strongest and least dependent, notably for the critical systems of modern warfare”.

What, however, is new about this roadmap, apart from the sense of urgency, is the intention to hold member states’ feet to the fire—to introduce the novel concepts of metrics and milestones, supervision, responsibility and accountability (with an annual progress report by the roadmap’s authors to an October EU summit). The European Commission compares the overall project to the creation of the single market and the euro—and clearly plans to play a comparable central role.

Politely, the European Commission describes this role as “facilitator”. It insists that “EU-NATO cooperation is key”. It avows that “Member States are and will remain sovereign for their national security and defence.” But the reality is that, after 20 years of gradually building a position in European defence despite the resistance of member states determined to protect their “sovereign prerogatives”, the European Commission is now bidding for the driving seat. Two key factors have enabled its advance. First has been the failure of member states to live up to their promises to do the necessary themselves. The irresistible logic of greater integration of European defence efforts, endlessly reiterated down the years, has butted up against the immovable obstacle of national vested interests—military, industrial and political. The European Commission, equipped now with its own defence commissioner and directorate-general, has emerged as the EU institution best able to address defence issues strategically.

And it has done so armed with money. The mobilisation of the general EU budget for defence purposes has been key—first with pilot subsidy programmes worth a billion or two a year, and most recently as underpinning for the €150bn of cheap borrowing eagerly taken up by the member states. Looking ahead, the roadmap dangles the prospect of hundreds of billions more euros in the next seven-year budget. Like it or not, member states were never going to get access to funds on this scale without European Commission oversight of how they were spent.

So the roadmap in effect challenges the member states to get with the European Commission programme; and it is clearly determined to keep up the momentum. New proposals are promised: a Military Mobility package in November; a European Defence Transformation Roadmap by the end of November (transformation of industry, this); by mid-2026, a European Commission overview of the “industrial capacity ramp-up” needed.

Nonetheless, the European Commission will have trouble making its writ run. National capitals view the European Commission’s intrusion into defence matters much like the appearance of knotweed in a walled garden. But, as the October 23rd summit communiqué makes clear, national leaders have had little option but to follow the European Commission’s plan, while managing to imply that its key ideas were theirs to begin with, and that the member states already have matters well in hand. The only explicit point of difference on which the summiteers contradict the roadmap is on the proposed annual progress review, which (the leaders’ communiqué decrees) will be led by the European Defence Agency (a body firmly under their control) instead of the European Commission. (The long-neglected EDA is also to be strengthened, “so that it can fully play its role”—counter-balancing the European Commission, presumably.)

The roadmap in effect challenges the member states to get with the European Commission programme

So the instinct to resist this latest European Commission “power grab” will be strong. But the rapid disbursement of vast sums on a crash effort to restore the continent’s neglected defences self-evidently needs a comprehensive plan—and no one else has one. Indeed, the member states have spent the last four years since the Russian reinvasion of Ukraine demonstrating their collective inability to find a way to coordinate effectively among themselves. A cat’s cradle of intersecting bi- and mini-lateral groupings has grown up, but none is capable of exercising EU-wide leadership. Only a handful of new joint endeavours has emerged—and some key initiatives, notably the Franco-German projects for new combat aircraft and tanks, have got bogged down. National capitals agree on the need to spend big money fast—but have no shared understanding of how to do so to best effect.

Thus, like it or not, the European Commission’s plan is the only game in town. And unless the roadmap succeeds in delivering the demonstrable transformation of Europe’s defence capacity to which all are supposedly committed, it will be hard to pass this off as anything other than a body-blow to EU ambitions of ever amounting to more than a trading bloc. And Putin and Trump will be watching with interest.