Defence Industrial Readiness

European defence has entered a phase in which higher budgets are no longer the central test. The harder question is whether Europe can convert political urgency, EU industrial instruments and NATO capability pressure into real military output: ammunition, missiles, air defence, ground systems, naval platforms, drones, electronic warfare, cyber defence, maintenance capacity, spare parts and replenished stockpiles.

The issue is not simply whether governments are spending more, but whether industry can produce, scale, repair and sustain enough equipment at the speed required by a high-intensity crisis. The report examines this question in four stages.

This analysis answers: Why has industrial readiness, rather than budget size, become the decisive test of European strategic autonomy? How broad is Europe's defence-industrial policy architecture and how effective is it at converting spending into military output? Which bottlenecks constrain readiness across key capability domains such as ammunition, missiles, air defence and naval platforms? How should company-mapping logic start from conversion capacity to identify where industry can produce, scale and sustain?