Europe's €454bn defence spend deepens reliance on US systems

Europe is on course to spend €454 billion on defence this year, a figure that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Yet the more the continent spends, the more tightly it binds itself to American hardware, software and strategic decision-making. That is the paradox at the heart of European rearmament: a drive for autonomy that currently runs through Washington.

The spending paradox

The €454 billion figure, equivalent to roughly 2.4% of EU GDP, represents the most ambitious military outlay in the Union's history. But the money is not buying independence. According to data discussed by security researchers Ian Lesser and Linus Terhorst, only 53% of EU defence procurement stays within Europe. Over a third flows directly to US contractors. In aerospace, the share heading across the Atlantic climbs to nearly two-thirds.

The numbers reveal a structural problem. European governments are not simply choosing American kit because it is better; they are buying it because European alternatives do not exist, or because joint projects have collapsed. The Franco-German Future Combat Air System, intended to produce a sixth-generation fighter, has stalled over industrial workshare disagreements between Dassault and Airbus. Berlin's response has been to order additional F-35A Lightning II jets from Lockheed Martin to replace its Tornado fleet, and to purchase Tomahawk cruise missiles from Raytheon to fill a long-range strike gap that the Taurus missile, built by MBDA Deutschland, cannot yet cover.

Three layers of dependence

Terhorst maps the dependence across three dimensions. The first is physical: US troops, bases and pre-positioned equipment stationed across the continent, integrated into NATO's command structure. The second is industrial: weapons systems, intellectual property, digital infrastructure and command-and-control networks that are American-designed and American-controlled. The third is intelligence: space-based imagery, early-warning data and signals intelligence that European agencies rely on daily but cannot generate themselves.

This third layer is the least visible but perhaps the most consequential. European satellites provide a fraction of the persistent surveillance coverage that US assets deliver. When the continent's leaders meet in Brussels to assess a crisis, the intelligence picture they share is largely constructed from American sensors and American processing. That dependency cannot be solved by buying more tanks or aircraft; it requires a sovereign space architecture that does not yet exist.

The Franco-German engine sputters

The collapse of the Future Combat Air System talks illustrates a deeper dysfunction. France and Germany have attempted to co-develop major weapons systems for decades, the Tiger helicopter, the Eurofighter, the MAWS maritime patrol aircraft, and each programme has been delayed, over budget, or both. The root cause is not technical but political: neither Paris nor Berlin is willing to cede industrial leadership, and both insist on workshare guarantees that reflect domestic political imperatives rather than engineering logic.

Germany's decision to buy F-35s and Tomahawks is a rational short-term fix. The Luftwaffe needs nuclear-capable aircraft for NATO's nuclear sharing mission by the mid-2020s, and the Tornado is retiring. The Taurus missile, while capable, lacks the range and penetration aids required for the deepest targets. But each American purchase deepens the lock-in: software updates, spare parts chains, training pipelines and mission planning tools all remain under US control. Belgium faces the same calculus; its F-35 buy, Lesser notes, is justified as much by the desire to participate in NATO operations far from Belgian airspace as by national defence needs.

Geography dictates different threats

Lesser argues that the debate over what European defence is for remains unresolved because the answer depends on where you sit. Poland and the Baltic states prioritise land warfare and air defence against a Russian threat they perceive as immediate. Greece and Turkey eye each other across the Aegean. Italy and Spain focus on maritime security in the Mediterranean. Finland and Sweden, NATO's newest members, bring Arctic and Baltic expertise but also distinct threat perceptions.

This fragmentation makes coherent procurement extraordinarily difficult. During the Cold War, NATO accepted niche capabilities: Belgian mine-hunting, Dutch submarine operations, German armoured divisions. Today's contingencies, a crisis in the Hormuz Strait, a flare-up in the Eastern Mediterranean, a hybrid campaign against Baltic infrastructure, demand capabilities that no single European nation possesses and that the alliance assumes the United States will provide.

Burden-sharing and the Pacific pivot

The tension is not new. Successive US administrations have pressed Europeans to spend more and assume greater responsibility for their own security. What has changed is the credibility of the American security guarantee. Washington's strategic focus has shifted toward the Indo-Pacific, where China's military expansion demands naval and air assets that cannot be simultaneously deployed to Europe. The US maintains it can fight in two theatres, but planners in Brussels and Berlin privately doubt that assurance.

Terhorst points out that the pressure on Europe comes at the same moment that US capacity to fulfil its European commitments is being stretched. American munitions stocks have been drawn down by support for Ukraine and by operations in the Middle East. The industrial base that would surge production in a major conflict has atrophied. Europeans are being asked to fill gaps that the United States itself cannot quickly replenish.

The nightmare scenario

What keeps researchers awake is not a single contingency but the unpredictability of the environment. Lesser, a military historian by training, notes that stable security relationships have historically unravelled with startling speed. The combination of a fracturing European defence market, a United States distracted by the Pacific, and a Russia that has demonstrated willingness to use force creates a window of vulnerability that no current spending plan addresses.

The specific fear is a crisis in Europe, perhaps a hybrid attack on critical infrastructure, of the sort already seen at Leipzig Airport and elsewhere, coinciding with a major US commitment in Asia. In that scenario, European leaders would discover that the intelligence, command-and-control and precision-strike capabilities they assumed would be available are either denied or delayed by Washington's competing priorities.