Europe has long been forged through crises. To do so again on defense, the EU will need to develop new institutional capabilities. That was the stark assessment offered by Commissioner for Defense and Space Andrius Kubilius at the European Industry Forum in Brussels.
The bloc’s struggle to close critical capability gaps and scale its defense industry is rooted in a simple reality: that it has 27 national defense policies and 27 separate budgets, Kubilius argued.
“We need to find a way to balance the [existing] bottom-up approach with much more top-down influence,” he told the audience on Wednesday.
While insisting that member states should remain in the driver’s seat of defense policy, the former Lithuanian prime minister said the best way to build a stronger and more independent Europe is to create new mechanisms for coordinating different strategic cultures and threat perceptions.
In practical terms, Kubilius wants to advance plans for a European Defense Union and explore the creation of a European Security Council — a new intergovernmental framework that could include the U.K., Norway and Ukraine. Such a body could discuss issues ranging from the European pillar of NATO to defense industrial policy.
The idea is not new, Kubilius acknowledged, but it is gaining traction in the European Parliament, among several EU capitals and even with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
“Now we see a totally different situation [in Europe], and that allows us to understand that there are some doubts about whether that [peacetime] arrangement, that [security] architecture is fitting,” he said.
Another issue that will demand attention in the months and years ahead, according to Kubilius, is how member states are spending the money allocated to strengthen their defense and security capabilities.
“We are still very much procuring what our big primes traditionally were producing,” he said. “In some way, that also influences our defense and war doctrines, and we are not transforming our demands.”
In his view, European military doctrines should follow Ukraine’s example by better integrating innovation and smaller players into procurement processes and defense planning.
For now, Kubilius said, “there is not enough space for start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises to grow up.”
At the same time, he added, Europe’s largest economies, including Germany and France, still purchase relatively little defense equipment directly from their European partners.
According to an analysis by economist Guntram Wolff, domestic companies in Germany currently receive 60% of defense orders — double the share recorded in 2020 — while “almost nothing” is procured directly from other European countries.
That reality could soon begin to change. The European Commission is expected to present a package by early July aimed at creating a single market for defense. The objective is to reduce fragmentation and lower the costs of growing the defense industry.
The absence of a genuine single market for defense products and services is “a big strategic problem” for the bloc, Kubilius concluded.
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