NATO's Wiring Problem

Europe is spending more on defense, having slowly discovering how much of what it needs it does not actually own.

Europe is beginning to identify, one system at a time, the parts of its own defense that were never really European. Not the tanks. Not the infantry vehicles. Not even the ammunition, though the shortages there remain severe. The real exposure lies in the military architecture that makes modern operations possible: air-to-air refueling; strategic lift; satellite reconnaissance, command-and-control systems, battlefield logistics, and space-based intelligence (ISR); and integrated air and missile defense, and the high-end surveillance networks that allow forces to see, move, strike, and sustain themselves.

Those are the capabilities NATO has long treated as available because the United States made them available. They were the wiring inside the alliance, without which European military power becomes less an autonomous instrument than a collection of capable national forces waiting for someone else to connect the circuit.

EU defense chief Andrius Kubilius publicly acknowledged last week this reality. Kubilius is exploring a proposal under which European countries would voluntarily devote part of their expanded defense budgets to jointly fund those strategic enablers now provided largely by the United States. He has put the cost of replacing these American capabilities at roughly €500 billion.

That is not a budget line. It is a diagnosis.

What America Actually Provided

For most of the post-Cold War era, European defense planning operated on a quiet assumption: the United States would be there. Not just with troops and nuclear guarantees, but with everything else — the satellites that watch what moves on the ground, the aircraft that refuel fighters mid-mission, the logistics networks that move armies across a continent, the intelligence architecture that tells commanders what they are looking at before they decide what to do about it.

These were not capabilities European governments chose to forgo. They were capabilities European governments chose not to duplicate, because duplication seemed wasteful when the American version was already there, already integrated, already functioning. The peace dividend was a European choice as much as an American one.

What has changed is not that the capabilities disappeared. They are still there. And the United States remains the center of gravity in NATO. But it is no longer a stable assumption in European planning.

President Donald Trump did not create every European defense weakness, and it would be too easy to blame one American president for decades of European underinvestment. The peace dividend was European as well as American. So was the preference for small inventories, just-in-time production, and defense industries sized for limited contingencies rather than prolonged war.

But Trump, who arrived yesterday (June 15) at the G7 summit in France, has changed the political calculation. His indifference to alliances and his transactional view of NATO have forced Europe to confront a possibility that once sat outside polite planning assumptions: the United States may remain in NATO and still become unreliable at the moment Europe needs it most.

The New Arithmetic

Europe’s rearmament is real. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in April estimated European military spending up 14 percent in 2025 — the sharpest single-year increase since 1953. Germany has broken through the 2 percent GDP threshold for the first time since 1990. Poland is targeting 5 percent by 2035 and is already the EU’s largest claimant under the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative—the €150 billion loan facility Brussels created to fund joint procurement. Rheinmetall, the German defense prime, in April reported a backlog of nearly €73 billion.

The money is moving, but toward conventional military capabilities — items and budgets that translate cleanly into political speeches about sovereignty.

However, the harder layer lies underneath. The Kiel Institute estimated last month that replacing American command-and-control, reconnaissance, communications, space launch, electronic warfare, airlift, and AI-enabled logistics would cost a minimum of €200 billion and take a decade or more. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) puts the total cost of substituting U.S. contributions to the European theater at roughly $1 trillion.

The Week That Clarified Things

Two developments this month made the underlying problem harder to ignore.

The first was the collapse of FCAS — the Future Combat Air System, a decade-long Franco-German-Spanish effort to build a next-generation fighter. Berlin “pulled the plug“ after irreconcilable differences between Dassault and Airbus. Belgium’s prime minister called it “pure stupidity,” warning that Europe had chosen to be “irrelevant in a crucial part of air defense.”

The program was supposed to be the flagship of European high-end integration: not just a jet, but a networked system of crewed aircraft, drones, sensors, and satellites. Instead, it broke under the weight of industrial rivalry and divergent national requirements. France wanted a carrier-capable fighter. Germany wanted an air superiority platform. Dassault and Airbus wanted different workshare arrangements.

Germany can try to build its own sixth-generation aircraft — an expensive and time-consuming path that a consortium of German aerospace companies is already proposing. France can go it alone, which Dassault always said was possible, though France’s strained public finances make that harder than it sounds. Countries can buy more F-35s — deepening exactly the U.S. dependence European leaders say they are trying to reduce. Or they can explore joining the UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Programme, though its transition this month into the full design phase may make existing members reluctant to reopen the political and industrial compromises on which the project now rests.

None of these options is clean. None closes the capability gap quickly. And each one illustrates a pattern that runs across European defense: every move toward autonomy carries a reminder of dependency.

The second development was Kubilius floating his €500 billion initiative on strategic enablers — not as a funded program, but as an aspiration, a way of naming the problem publicly and testing whether European governments have the appetite to address it. The honest answer, for now, is that most of them do not. Budgets are stretched. Debt is high. The energy crisis tied to the Iran war has complicated fiscal room across the continent.

The Dependency That Doesn’t Move

Air and missile defense shows the same pattern in sharper relief. Patriot remains the backbone of European NATO defensive architecture, but demand now exceeds production timelines by years. Denmark chose in April the French-Italian SAMP/T system not because it was superior but because it was available — the Patriot queue had simply grown too long. Switzerland is now weighing whether to cancel its Patriot order entirely, after Washington reshuffled deliveries first for Ukraine and then for the Iran war. A Swiss government statement last month spoke of pursuing “a potential additional system that is preferably produced in Europe.“

And yet: Europe does not yet have an answer to the full threat spectrum Patriot covers. Aster 30 production runs at roughly 220 to 250 rounds per year against a recommended minimum of 500. Europe has no exo-atmospheric missile defense, meaning the top tier of the defensive architecture against ballistic missile threats remains exclusively American. These are not gaps that close because a procurement fund doubled in size.

The Clock Ukraine Is Running

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has been the stress test that revealed the dependency. Europe discovered its gaps and bottlenecks while trying to sustain a major conventional war on its own continent. The shortage of 155mm shells, the strain on Patriot inventories, the reshuffling of delivery queues, and the scramble to expand missile and drone production all trace back to the same fact: Ukraine forced Europe to measure its defense-industrial base against wartime demand rather than peacetime assumptions.

Every month Ukraine continues to hold the line is a month Russian power remains consumed by the war Moscow chose. It is also a month European factories can expand, procurement systems can adjust, stockpiles can be rebuilt, and governments can begin addressing the strategic enablers they now know they cannot quickly replace. Ukraine is buying Europe time, not in the abstract but in the most practical sense: production time, political time, industrial time, and strategic time.

That is what makes Trump’s ambivalence toward Ukraine so damaging for Europe. It is not merely a disagreement over aid levels or battlefield strategy. It threatens the buffer Europe needs to complete its own transition. If Ukraine is forced into a settlement that rewards Russian aggression before Europe has rebuilt credible deterrence, the continent’s defense-industrial effort becomes a race already behind schedule.

Ukraine may also become part of the answer. European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) — the €1.5 billion EU-wide initiative, covering 2026-2027, to strengthen and modernize Europe’s defense industry — earmarks €300 million specifically for Ukraine’s defense industry, a small figure compared with Europe’s broader needs but an important signal of direction. If Ukraine moves closer to the EU and its defense sector becomes integrated into the European defense-industrial base, Kyiv would no longer be only a consumer of European support. It could become a producer inside the European system — particularly in drones, munitions, electronic warfare, battlefield software, and the improvised technologies that prolonged war has forced it to develop at speed.

That possibility changes the long-term picture. Europe’s defense-industrial future may not be built only in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Rome, London, or Brussels. Part of it may be built in Ukraine, by a country whose industry has been shaped not by procurement theory but by battlefield necessity.

Ukraine therefore serves three roles at once. It revealed the dependency. It is buying time to reduce it. And it may eventually become part of the industrial base Europe needs in order to live with a less reliable America.

The Trajectory

The most Europe can plausibly hope for over the next several years is not independence. It is time and continuity. Time for Ukraine to preserve at least the strategic status quo. Time for Russian power to continue being consumed by the war it chose. Time for European production to expand. Time for a future U.S. administration, perhaps in 2029, to return to a less hostile view of NATO, Ukraine, and transatlantic security.

In short, reduced exposure.

Europe still needs the United States. It still needs NATO. It still needs American ISR, airlift, refueling, missile defense, logistics, and strategic command architecture. But it can no longer afford to need them quite so completely.

The answer to Europe’s defense challenge will not arrive in one summit, one budget, or one industrial program. It will come through the marginal decisions underway: a European air-defense system chosen over Patriot because delivery matters; a joint procurement fund that favors European components; a Polish factory built through Korean technology transfer; a German defense firm becoming a continental prime; a British-French agreement that quietly restores strategic depth; a satellite program funded because Washington may not always share what it sees.

None of these decisions changes the balance by itself, but they do reflect the beginning of a different Europe: more serious, more capable, and still far more dependent than its leaders want to admit.