After three lost years in which Vladimir Putin has devastated half of Ukraine without Europe reconsidering its security, the victory of Donald Trump has finally raised the alarm: our continent depends on the protective umbrella that the United States has placed over us for decades. If Washington withdraws, as it is already warning it will, we will need to fill the empty arsenals, recruit young people for our weak armies, and manufacture the weaponry that we used to buy from others.
Brussels is trying to get moving with its ReArm plan, renamed after pressure from Pedro Sánchez as Readiness 2030. But even if we started today and did everything right, the path to reaching the level of our rivals, in quantity and quality, could take us five years to see the first effects, but decades to complete.
There is only one thing more expensive than investing in deterrence, and that is not doing it. What do we lack and instead need in order not to be perceived as vulnerable by our enemies? "If we forget about the US, which is light-years ahead, Europe does not lack technology. Except for nuclear weapons, we have almost everything, and almost everything is better than what Russia or China have, but in insufficient quantities," says retired Admiral Juan Rodríguez Garat. "How long would it take us to defend ourselves from Russia? The time it takes to balance the nuclear scale. If the question is limited to conventional warfare, the only problem is money. If the European industry has the contracts it needs to grow, five years will be enough to put our arsenals in order. However, if we compare ourselves to the US, it would take much longer. Not less than a decade for critical tasks like defending European skies and even longer to put fifth-generation aircraft into service," he explains.
In Europe, we do not produce these fifth-generation fighter-bombers. The United States has invested over three decades in developing the F35 fighter from the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, which began in 1992 and was won by the defense giant Lockheed Martin in 2001. It took 15 years to enter service and did not see real combat until 2019 in Israel. Its fundamental feature is that it is radar-invisible, in addition to having integrated combat software and a pilot helmet with augmented reality. China also bet on this technology and produced the Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon, also stealthy, whose development required a similar time to the F35. On the other hand, Russia has 25 units of the Sukhoi or Su57, also fifth-generation and with stealth capabilities, but it has not been seen in combat in the skies of Ukraine, raising doubts about its real ability to evade radars against Western anti-aircraft batteries deployed along the front.
The closest thing Europe has to a fifth-generation fighter-bomber is the Eurofighter Typhoon, a fourth-generation aircraft built by the European consortium Eurofighter GmbH, created in 1983 and composed of the companies Airbus Group, BAE Systems, and Alenia Aeronautica, with the participation of the Spanish company EADS. Although its pilots often speak highly of it, it is not stealthy and can no longer compete in many aspects with these highly technological aircraft. If we want to reach their level, we have to buy them: the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Poland already have F35 units or have placed orders, depending on the United States for their spare parts, software, updates, etc.
The same can be said for weapons like ballistic missiles, a weapon that Russia uses daily in Ukraine. Europe does not manufacture them and is limited to cruise missiles, slower and easier to intercept, such as the British Storm Shadow and the German Taurus. Cruise missiles fly low, like an airplane, and are rocket-propelled on a horizontal trajectory, while ballistic missiles follow a parabolic path until they exit the atmosphere and then fall freely due to gravity. They are more difficult to intercept in their terminal phase due to their hypersonic speed.
This reveals another gap in European capabilities: we do not have a European-made anti-aircraft system capable of shooting them down, and we depend on the American Patriot for that. Diehl Defence manufactures the IRIS-T batteries that Ukraine has been using successfully for years, as well as the SAMP/T systems, produced by the Franco-Italian MBDA. Both can intercept short-range ballistic missiles, but not intercontinental ones. For that, only the US, Japan, and Israel have THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) launchers capable of destroying this type of missile when they re-enter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
In the nuclear realm, our stockpiles of atomic weapons against Russia or China are also very limited: only the United Kingdom and France possess such technological terrors. To be more precise, London and Paris have a handful of strategic nuclear bombs, but not tactical ones. What are the differences between the two? Tactical ones are intended to be used in a specific combat zone (conquering or defending a limited territory) and have much less power than a strategic one, which is used to win a war (such as the ones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
In a hypothetical nuclear escalation, if Europe does not have the atomic umbrella of the US, we are left without a gradual response to a limited use of tactical weapons by the adversary (and Russia has thousands of warheads). This poses a credible dilemma of retaliation: the country with only strategic bombs can be paralyzed, because any response with them would be disproportionate and could escalate to a total nuclear war with the consequent mutual assured destruction, the last rung of the ladder.
Military analyst Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian army, believes that beyond personnel or equipment limitations, the main restriction for Europe to assume a more prominent role in its own defense is the lack of political will. This suggests that, although there are resources and capabilities, political cohesion and joint decision-making remain significant challenges.
Another thing that Europe lacks is industrial capacity not only to fill its own arsenals today but to sustain a high-ammunition consumption war like the one in Ukraine, which in many ways is an old-fashioned war where drones have emerged in all their forms. In the first months of the invasion, the Spanish Ministry of Defense donated 8,000 artillery shells to Ukraine. That same day, a Ukrainian commander told this reporter: "The first thing I want to do is thank your Minister of Defense. The second thing I want to tell you is that we launched these shells in one afternoon."
Indeed, the Russians have fired over 60,000 bombs in 24 hours, compared to about 15,000 from Ukraine. There is no European country that can withstand more than a few days of war with such consumption, although production has multiplied in recent months.
Another challenge that the European industry faces in this effort is the duplicity and disintegration of systems. While the US, Russia, and China have a single platform as a main battle tank (M1 Abrams, T series, and Type99, respectively), Europe has six different models with six assembly lines, maintenance, and logistics chains (Leopard in Germany; Challenger in the UK; Leclerc in France; Ariete in Italy and M1 Abrams and K2 (made in South Korea) in Poland. This variety of models highlights that countries prioritize their national companies over European interests, ultimately increasing the cost of the product.
The Real Instituto Elcano has previously criticized the fragmentation of European defense industries, leading to duplications and foreign dependencies, especially on the US defense industry. Max Bergmann, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), advocates for reconsidering the creation of a common European army, arguing that defending Europe with multiple national armies without US support is neither logical nor practical, but it will be difficult for a single soldier to be willing to die for a flag, that of Europe, rather than their own country's.
The Atlantic Council highlights that the new Defense plans could require Europe to increase its military capacity goals by approximately 30%, suggesting that Defense spending should rise to 3% of GDP. Countries like the United Kingdom and Poland are already taking steps in this direction, but other states like Spain are lagging behind to reach 2%. Undoubtedly, the neighbors of Russia are the ones who allocate the most resources, frightened by its aggressiveness.