Dual-Use Civil Infrastructure in Europe as an Enabling Layer for Defence Readiness and Strategic Autonomy

The strategic landscape of Europe is undergoing a fundamental recalibration, transitioning from a post-Cold War emphasis on expeditionary management to a robust “Readiness First” posture. Central to this shift is the recognition that military mass is operationally inert without an underlying architecture of resilient, high-capacity civil infrastructure. This report examines how the European Union is systematically re-engineering its dual-use commons—spanning trans-European transport corridors, undersea data backbones, and space-based secure connectivity—to serve as a decisive enabling layer for collective defense.

By aligning civilian investment instruments like the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) with the operational requirements of NATO, the Union is moving beyond symbolic asset ownership toward a model of assured access and rapid restoration. The analysis is structured to evaluate the “constraint stack” that governs European throughput, moving from physical bottlenecks to the governance layers that manage them. It first addresses the logistical ceiling of military mobility and transport corridors, before examining the strategic dependencies of submarine cable networks and space-based mission assurance.

The final sections assess the regulatory and financial enablers—specifically the NIS2 and CER Directives alongside the SAFE and EDIP instruments—that convert infrastructure resilience into a force multiplier. By identifying operational failure modes and the specific EU instruments designed to mitigate them, the report provides a research-grade assessment of Europe’s path toward a unified and deployable strategic autonomy. The current European defence readiness agenda explicitly treats “readiness” as an end-to-end delivery problem rather than a narrow capability-planning topic, where industrial output, regulatory throughput, and operational mobility must cohere under time pressure.