Europe can’t defend itself---they rely on US heg and military support for deterrence.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it seemed like a transformational moment for European security. Surely now Europe would finally get its act together on defense. But as the war enters its second year, such a transformation has not materialized. The fault for the ongoing stasis lies with many parties—European states, NATO, the European Union and even the United States—all of whom have defaulted to the comfortable practices of the past in the hope of preserving an untenable status quo.

This is not to say that Europe has not been altered by the war. European publics and their leaders have rallied in support of Ukraine and maintained their support despite skyrocketing energy prices and high inflation. European countries have provided massive quantities of arms to Ukraine although not as much as the United States. Finland and Sweden have applied to join NATO. The EU has provided billions in lethal equipment to Ukraine and is training Ukrainian forces. And the sense of shock and urgency felt by European leaders in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reflected clearly in defense spending hikes. Now most European countries in NATO come close to the organization’s goal that all members spend at least two percent of GDP on defense, with some countries such as Poland and the Baltic states spending far more.

But look more closely, and these changes seem less than transformative. Although the current spending bonanza might suggest a transformation, it may amount to little if underlying issues plaguing European defense remain unaddressed.

Instead of galvanizing efforts to address deep structural problems in European defense, the war has only reinforced them. European forces are in worse shape than previously thought, and weapons stockpiles have necessarily been depleted to support Ukraine. As Europe seeks to rearm, it is finding that its defense industries aren’t fit for purpose. Efforts to coordinate European procurements are not working, with countries all going their own separate ways, adding to the general dysfunction. The United States has demonstrated its indispensability to European security and confirmed Europe’s dependence on Washington. European leaders have seemingly accepted this as the natural state of affairs, with many declaring the pursuit of European “strategic autonomy” dead and turning their backs on cooperation with other EU countries. The momentum in favor of reform and change that had built up over the last decade appears to have vanished.

Although proposals exist for addressing these problems, none offer the kind of sweeping initiative that would be necessary to fix them. In short, a broken status quo prevails.

But the present situation is unsustainable. Joe Biden may be the last truly transatlanticist U.S. president, as a generational change will eventually come to American politics. While American national security leaders brought up in the twentieth century were consumed with European security—from the Cold War to NATO expansion and the Balkan wars—a younger generation focused instead on the Middle East, counterterrorism, and now, China. If Europeans do not reform their fragmented defense forces and procurement systems now, they will soon be back where they started before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The opportunity to transform European defense is slipping away.

WORSE THAN FEARED

The war has revealed the appalling state of European defense. Europe has underinvested in its armed forces for the past 20 years, and what little funding it did commit was focused on building forces for humanitarian, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism missions far from the continent, such as in Afghanistan. European militaries thus lack the basics needed for conventional warfare in their own backyards. Most countries lack basic ammunition stockpiles. The German armed forces, for instance, only have stocks of ammunition for a few hours or days of combat. Tank fleets across Europe have atrophied both in numbers and readiness. Germany has 300 Leopard 2 tanks on paper, but only 130 are operational. And it is not just Germany: Spain also has more than 300 Leopard tanks, but one-third of them are no longer active and are largely in disrepair. Europeans lack sufficient quantities of artillery and are therefore heavily depleting their forces to support Ukraine. France, for instance, has sent more than one-third of its howitzers to Ukraine, while Denmark has sent practically all of its artillery. Although European states, to great acclaim, committed themselves earlier this year to sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine, it is unclear how long it will take to make them combat-ready.

At the NATO summit in Madrid last summer, the alliance refocused on the Russia threat and the demands of conventional warfare. NATO agreed on the goal of creating a ready force of 300,000, up from 40,000 today. But as a multilateral organization, NATO sets targets that it hopes its member states will meet on their own—and no one explained how the organization would collectively meet such an ambitious goal. And even those European leaders who are determined to support Ukraine and ramp up their own capabilities to deter Russia do not have the kind of arsenals, supply chains, production capacities, and procurement procedures that the task at hand requires.

The European defense industrial base, meanwhile, has been hollowed out. The root cause is low European defense spending. But a broader issue is that Europe does not have a common defense market to meet the needs of European security. What it has is more than 25 different Pentagons, each with its own national procurement. This scattered landscape makes meaningful cooperation on procurement a huge political and bureaucratic undertaking. European defense spending is thus heavily fragmented and often directed at supporting national military industrial complexes.