Europe leans into defence

Europe is talking less about whether it should defend itself and more about how fast it can buy the parts. On April 10, European Union defence commissioner Andrius Kubilius said a “European army” could “help fix” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not replace it. (politico.eu) That line landed because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was built around one simple bargain: Europe fields forces, and the United States supplies a huge share of the heavy lift. In April 2026, Spanish officials were openly saying recent United States remarks about the alliance were pushing Europe to look for backup security options. (msn.com) Europe is not starting from zero money. The European Commission’s March 19, 2025 white paper called for a “once-in-a-generation surge” in defence investment and tied it to Readiness 2030, a plan meant to rebuild stocks, close capability gaps, and expand Europe’s defence industry. (eur-lex.europa.eu) The financing piece is already moving. On May 27, 2025, European Union ministers adopted Security Action for Europe, a €150 billion loan instrument for joint defence procurement, giving governments a cheaper way to place bigger shared orders. (consilium.europa.eu) The spending trend is real even before those loans are fully felt. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2025 expenditure report shows European allies and Canada rising fast, and the Atlantic Council said their 2025 spending was up 20 percent from the previous year, with every ally above the old 2 percent of gross domestic product target. (nato.int, atlanticcouncil.org) A lot of that money is going into air and missile defence, because Europe has watched Ukraine show what modern attacks look like. Instead of one type of threat, cities and bases can face drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles in the same raid, which is why buyers want layered systems rather than a single silver bullet. (eur-lex.europa.eu, interestingengineering.com) That is where Patriot keeps showing up. Raytheon said on April 8 that the Netherlands signed a $627 million Patriot deal covering radars, launchers, and command-and-control stations, and the company says Patriot now underpins air defence for 19 countries, including nine in Europe. (rtx.com) The command-and-control piece is the tell. A launcher is the visible part, but the expensive logic sits in the software that fuses radar tracks, sorts real threats from decoys, assigns interceptors, and passes orders fast enough that crews are not guessing under a 30-second deadline. (rtx.com, eur-lex.europa.eu) The same shift shows up in Europe’s own shopping list. The Readiness 2030 paper names air and missile defence, military mobility, stockpiles, artificial intelligence, quantum, cyber, and electronic warfare, which is a polite way of saying the continent needs better sensors, better networks, and fewer logistics bottlenecks. (eur-lex.europa.eu) So the near-term winners are not only missile makers. The bigger order book is likely to spread across radar processing, simulation tools, secure communications, maintenance software, and the digital plumbing that lets German, Dutch, Polish, and French units see the same picture at the same time. (eur-lex.europa.eu, consilium.europa.eu) Kubilius’s “European army” line sounded dramatic, but the practical version is more mundane and probably more achievable. Europe is building a defence stack the way a company rebuilds its information technology department: first the budget, then the shared standards, then the software, then the hardware that plugs into it. (politico.eu, eur-lex.europa.eu)