How European defence public finance works

In defence and dual-use, the public sector is the primary buyer — so public money is both the way to scale a company and the first signal of which companies matter. It flows in four layers: the law that creates the instruments; the bodies that provide the money (EU, banks, NATO, member states); the mechanisms that move it to a company (grants, tenders, loans, equity) behind an eligibility gate; and the visible outputs — awards, grant beneficiaries and fund portfolios — that de-risk a company and pull private capital in behind it.