Foreword

Dear Reader,

20 years ago, I was working in Brussels with then-EU High Representative Javier Solana. Under his leadership, we drafted the Union’s first-ever security strategy entitled “A Secure Europe in a Better World.” Today, the situation is entirely different. Faced with Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine, Europe is no longer secure. We no longer have the luxury to prepare for a better world. We must prepare for an era of fierce geopolitical competition where the rules-based international order is under constant attack by autocratic revisionists, as the 2023 Munich Security Report details.

When introducing our last European Defense Report in 2017, my esteemed colleague and predecessor Wolfgang Ischinger wrote that “now is the moment to develop Europe as a much more credible security actor.” The report called for higher, smarter, and more joint European spending on defense. What was true then, is even more pertinent now.

Putin’s war against Ukraine shows just how dependent we Europeans still are on our American friends. Without their substantial military assistance to Ukraine, Russian troops would already stand at the Polish border. Without the US security guarantee, Putin would probably not stop there.

We cannot simply keep relying on the US when it comes to security on our own continent. Sooner or later, the US will shift its attention to the Indo-Pacific. They will rightly expect us to provide Ukraine with the support it needs and to take care of our own self-defense. These are two sides of the same coin. Ukraine is defending our freedom and we must do everything in our power to make sure that freedom is better equipped than tyranny.

Foremost, we need to do our homework and invest more in our security. After Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, all NATO Allies agreed to spend two percent of their GDPs on defense by 2024. It is unacceptable that in 2022, only five EU member states met this goal. It is good news that 20 of them have announced spending increases since February 2022. However, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Some European countries, including my own, are already falling behind their promises. Increased spending will be key for a stronger European pillar in NATO.

This pillar needs to rest on a robust and cohesive defense industrial base. Our 2017 European Defense Report already deplored the high degree of fragmentation in Europe and the vast opportunity costs this entails. Uncoordinated national spending increases now even risk exacerbating Europe’s defense industrial fragmentation. The sense of urgency and rise in demand triggered by the Russian war against Ukraine has led many Europeans to buy equipment off-the-shelf and abroad. While this is understandable, it will also lead to inefficiencies and create new dependencies in the medium- to long-term. We need to strike a better balance between the need for speed and a sustainable European defense industrial and technological base.

This dilemma comes on top of well-known obstacles to European defense cooperation. They include a lack of political leadership, parochial industrial interests, a lack of standardization, and a patchwork of national arms control regulations. At the European Defense Roundtable we hosted at this year’s Munich Security Conference, the message was clear: we all know these obstacles by heart. We have to use this transformative moment to finally move past them.We have missed too many wake-up calls in the past. These include the supposed “hour of Europe” in the Balkan wars in the 1990s, the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 when we Europeans had to rely on our American friends to evacuate our own citizens.

This time has to be different because the threat to the security of Europe has never been greater since the end of the Cold War. If a brutal war of territorial conquest launched by a member of the UN Security Council on European soil will not transform European defense, what will? And yet, we are still sitting on the fence. While we have accepted that the status quo ante is no longer tenable, we have not acted decisively enough to truly transform European defense to allow us to provide Ukraine with what it needs for the long term and defend ourselves in a potential future war.

This report represents a contribution to achieving this aim. It highlights positive developments in European defense seen in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the announced spending increases and innovative initiatives to procure and ramp up production together. Europeans now have to up and meet their spending promises, learn the lessons from the Ukrainian battlefields, push for EU-NATO cooperation from the bottom up, scale up EU initiatives, and embark on an ambitious path toward a single market for defense.

I very much hope that you find this report a useful read!

Ambassador Dr. Christoph Heusgen
Chairman of the Munich Security Conference