EUROPEAN DEFENCE GAP: Capabilities, Shortfalls and the Road to Strategic Autonomy

After three decades of post–Cold War contraction, European states are attempting to rebuild credible military capacity under compressed timelines, rising threat perceptions, and an evolving transatlantic division of labour. While the political and regulatory architecture for defence mobilisation has been largely established through successive EU and NATO initiatives, a measurable gap persists between financial commitments and operational readiness. By analysing expenditure patterns, capability shortfalls, industrial bottlenecks, command structures, and deterrence architecture across key domains, this report evaluates the distance between declared ambition and deployable power, identifying where progress is tangible, where structural constraints endure, and where Europe’s defence transformation remains contingent on decisions not yet taken. Europe knows what it must do. It does not yet know, in full, how to do it. Following decades of post-Cold War defence retrenchment, the continent now faces the task of reconstructing credible military capacity under severe time pressure — with U.S. strategic reorientation toward the Indo-Pacific accelerating the urgency, and Russian military potential assessed by European intelligence agencies as capable of direct conventional aggression within five years. This report provides a domain-by-domain assessment of European defence capabilities and the structural shortfalls that remain between political ambition and operational reality. The policy architecture is in place.