After years of neglect and dithering, defence is now firmly established at the top of the European policy agenda. In 2025 European NATO spending rose faster than at any time since the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s. Rearmament is the word of the day both at the EU level, through mechanisms like the €150 billion SAFE loan programme, and at the national level, with countries like Poland and Germany in particular accelerating their military investments – €47 billion and €108 billion budgets in 2026, respectively. France is set to reach a €64 billion budget in 2027, fully double in size than that which Macron found when he first became president in 2017. Even in Britain, which has long indulged in illusions of “defence leadership” while hollowing out HM Armed Forces and cooking the books, the public pressure for more defence spending has reached new heights.
The purpose of this apparent continent-wide military build-up is, of course, to deter a potential Russian attack on NATO territory – and to defeat it if deterrence fails. As it often happens in Europe, rhetoric and plans – like the EC’s Defence Readiness Roadmap – tend to race far ahead of reality, while spending commitments tend to turn into national industrial policy packages serving rather than focused on defence capability programmes. Even so, the scale of the new funding is enough so that some actual new weapons and equipment are getting procured, and arsenals are being rebuilt to some extent.
But is Europe buying the right kit for the job? The thicket of political and economic interests that are spawning around this newfound defence investment bonanza, as well as the multiplicity of (often ill-informed) “expert” views and national strategies, can obscure this most important and critical of questions.
There are plenty of pitfalls. One is the prevailing influence of intellectual “fashion” and the latest concepts inducted into the corpus of received wisdom – such as, again, the obsession over drones seen not least in the handwringing over the Shahed/Geran threat. This has led to a mushrooming of companies and start-ups flogging their drone and anti-drone wares across Europe. Some provide genuinely impressive solutions. Many are doubtful propositions.
Another pitfall is the tendency to prepare for the last war. Today this translates into a general assumption that a NATO-Russia war – which European military chiefs believe might ensue in the late 2020s – will look like the one in Ukraine since 2022. The idea quickly follows that this future war will also be matter of trenches, drones, artillery, and bloody manpower attrition on a vast scale. Some even continue to invest billions in buying attack helicopters and – less surprising, but not by much – new tanks.
But, leaving aside the quick march of technology which is already making some of the previous weapons and tactics obsolete, this kind of thinking ignores the important differences between these two scenarios. Europe’s significant airpower, for example, bears no comparison to Ukraine’s, for example; nor is there any similarity on the level of the aggregate industrial base, which is a huge, though latent, advantage for Europe over Russia. The geography of potential theatres of operation – e.g. around the Baltic/Poland, or down towards Romania – will likewise do much to alter campaign dynamics from what has been observed in Ukraine. Over and above all of these is the nuclear dimension; Europe’s French and British arsenals might be far inferior to Russia’s or America’s, but nonetheless they introduce radical differences in Moscow’s military calculations compared to the Ukraine scenario.
The overall picture for European rearmament is one of aiming for a kind of balanced force, i.e. looking to strengthen all areas of military capability at the same time and bring them to a new standard of mass and lethality. On the one hand this is sounds like a sensible and prudent idea, especially insofar as the additions begin to plug some of the gaps that might be left by the withdrawal of US forces from Europe in a worst-case political scenario. There is nothing wrong, at first sight, with boosting Defence across the board. Indeed, a great benefit – if not even a key driver – of this approach is that it keeps all Services and stakeholders happy: Everyone gets a healthy slice of the defence budget cake.
The downside of this way of “horizontal” rearmament is that it is inherently un-strategic. Again, Britain’s tradition of pursuing exactly such a “balanced force” model, which has brought the country to its present capability impasse, serves as a cautionary tale. In the European case, this same kind of rearmament is plugging capability gaps so that Europe can withstand a Russian invasion, rather than seeking to create genuine strategic advantage over Moscow through asymmetric force postures. In short, it is driven by a reactive, defensive mindset – at best hoping to achieve deterrence by denial, which reckless Russian leaders have been proven to discount – rather than one based on offensive thinking aiming to put Moscow on the back foot and make it fear effective retribution by NATO deep into Russia itself – deterrence by punishment.
Switching the weight of European rearmament to a model of deterrence by punishment is the single most important decision that can be taken for assuring the future security of the continent, with or without US backing. This does not need to involve total trade-offs in the current balance of capabilities currently in the procurement pipeline – but it would mean a re-jigging of priorities and budgets within the overall envelope.
This new approach would be centred on a large and diversified European arsenal of long-range strike (LRS) systems. Building it at scale as the key strategic pivot of European defence would involve three main lines of effort: Strike weapons (missiles); strike platforms (aircraft and drones); and supporting capabilities, chiefly space. And building it quickly is required by changing circumstances, especially the fact that the US might reverse – as part of Trump’s recent decision about troop cuts in Germany – a 2024 agreement for stationing long-range fires in Europe (especially Tomahawks and hypersonics).
There is already some good grounding for a new LRS-focused European strategy. For one, the leading European militaries already operate some LRS weapons with ranges of over 500 km and even beyond 1000 km, such as Storm Shadow, Taurus, Tomahawk or the French MdCN. Aside from using only subsonic cruise missile technology, the ranges are insufficient for undertaking strategic conventional warfare against Russia; but it’s a start.
The other aspect is that there is already some recognition – albeit insufficient – in Europe of the need to expand LRS capabilities. Back in 2023 NATO itself, through its then Deputy Secretary General, Mircea Geoana, recognised “Deep Precision Strike” – another name for LRS – as one of the alliance’s “top priorities”. And in 2024 France, Germany, Italy and Poland established the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA) initiative, with Sweden and the UK subsequently also joining. Among its ambitions is that of developing systems – both cruise and ballistic missiles – with ranges of up to 2000 km.
A third positive element to build on is a newfound European willingness to invest in space capabilities to the tune of over €90 billion until 2030, with Germany alone set to pour €35 billion into military space systems in the next four years. Procurement plans in this area cover all key space capability verticals, from satellite communication to navigation, intelligence and targeting, and even offensive counterspace. There are doubts as to how much of this can be accomplished and how soon, but the point is that Europe has now funded, and is working, on its own space layer which is essential for LRS missions and which will also – eventually – give it autonomy from US space power at least in some core areas.
There are, therefore, fairly good circumstances for a strong European LRS-focused strategy to take shape – but it is not nearly enough. What is urgently required is effective political and policy leadership that can argue the strategic case for LRS as the keystone of a European defence oriented towards deterrence by punishment and that can win the programmatic battles over funding and prioritisation for new LRS systems.
To be effective, this new strategic case must be anchored in new flagship capabilities. Two priorities stand out in addition to the existing UK and French projects for short and medium ballistic missiles (Project Nightfall and MBT, respectively), for supersonic cruise missiles (MBDA’s Stratus RS) and for hypersonic weapons – all of which should be accelerated.
The first would be a conventionally-armed intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) similar to Russia’s recently-introduced Oreshnik, able to range targets at up to 5500 km. From a place like Poland, this kind of weapon would be able to destroy vital and previously invulnerable Russian military-industrial infrastructure as far as Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, easily covering the concentration of Russian armaments plants beyond the Urals. From Scandinavia, it could reach all the way to the Bering Sea across the entire Arctic. Introducing this kind of vulnerability into Moscow’s calculations would inevitably strengthen NATO deterrence and change the terms of the strategic equation.
On a practical level, a European IRBM programme would also generate synergies with Europe’s growing space-rocket industrial landscape. The cost would be easily affordable: Building a 500-unit arsenal would roughly come to around €50 billion over ten years (at roughly €50 million per missile), including R&D, production, and the associated infrastructure – overall, less than 0.5 per cent of Europe’s projected combined defence spending up to 2035.
In the longer-term, the ultimate European flagship programme and perhaps the most consequential LRS system would be a strategic (nuclear-capable) stealth bomber. It would primarily serve as a long-range subsonic standoff carrier for Europe’s maturing deep-strike arsenal, with limited penetration capabilities but large payload capacity. A fleet of some 40 such aircraft would, again, boost deterrence against Russia, enhance Europe’s nuclear posture, and also give the Europeans – or at least the nations participating in the programme – a tool of overseas power projection perhaps more useful in coming decades than aircraft carriers.
The practical challenges should not be understated, but they are by no means insurmountable. While Europe lags far behind the US in some of the key technologies required – such as cutting-edge cross-spectrum stealth or software/AI integration – it is sufficiently advanced to build within ten years a bomber that could realistically rank second-best in the world after the US B-21/B-2.
One starting point could be to repurpose the ailing FCAS programme – which is working on Europe’s next-generation fighter jet, but is beset by stakeholder disagreements – into a bomber project, with the Global Combat Air Programme (involving UK, Italy and Japan) continuing to build a future fighter that can pair with it. FCAS heritage could be used in the bomber R&D, from stealth coatings (including from the nEUROn project) and engine technology to “combat cloud” AI-assisted decision aids and weapons/sensor networking. The total 10-year, 40-plane programme cost (acquisition) would likely be around €100 billion, with a huge cost of perhaps over €1 billion per unit – a high sum that approaches the total Typhoon programme cost (of about 700 planes), but, again, only a fraction of what Europe is set to spend over the coming decade.
To conclude, the precise nature and trajectory of European rearmament requires careful consideration. Simply securing – mostly through borrowing – large new sums of money for defence, and spending it liberally on all sorts of weapons just to tick capability boxes – and to also serve vested interests – without clear and specific strategic-operational reasons, is not necessarily, or even likely, a “win” for long-term security. Europe’s current defence spending spree is a rare opportunity – perhaps never to be seen again in our lifetimes, given the continent’s economic decline – to recast Europe’s defence outlook and even its standing in the world.
Directing funds and focus into long-range strike systems as a matter of priority – including IRBMs and strategic bombers – would raise asymmetric challenges for Russia and strengthen deterrence, while adding insurance against future reductions in US support. Most of all, this approach would expand Europe’s strategic reach and alter the nature of its military power, with geopolitical effects. In other words, it would finally make Europe a real player in the big game – which is what Europeans keep saying they want to be. If only they could get their act together…
Tech has broken our entire world model, but we are in denial