Europe's military programmes: strategies, costs and trade-offs

This paper investigates the expansion of EU military activities, involving the European Commission, other EU-related institutions and Member States. Expenditure on EU military programmes - defence-related R\&D, arms production, joint procurement, military mobility, and the supply of lethal weapons to third countries - has skyrocketed since 2021, well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with an increase of about 350% from 2021 to 2024. The European Commission is playing a growing role in developing initiatives in the defence domain, with programmes such as the European Defence Fund that supports research into and production of new weapons systems. In 2025, it announced the plan ReArm Europe, later renamed Readiness 2030, to sustain the further militarization of the EU. The largest arms-related programme, however, is the European Peace Facility that is funded by EU Member States - as opposed to previous actions funded by the EU budget - for the supply of weapons, ammunitions and equipment to non-EU countries; Ukraine has obtained € 5.6 billion of military supplies from the European Peace Facility since the start of the war with Russia. EU military programmes have spent a total amount of € 8.2 billion in 2023, as opposed to € 200 million in 2019. The largest part of Europe's military expenditure, however, is still found in national budgets. In 2024, NATO EU countries spent € 346 billion in their military budgets, with an increase in real terms of 66% between 2013 and 2024. When we consider the total spending of NATO EU countries and the major EU economies - Germany, France, Italy and Spain - we find that in the last decade the expansion of national military budgets, and particularly the acquisition of new weapons and equipment, has dramatically outpaced growth in GDP, total public expenditures and spending on the environment, education and health. In a context of widening conflicts, current political developments - in US policy and within the EU - are accelerating the militarisation of European policies without an adequate debate on real security needs, on the model of EU integration in defence and on the economic dimensions of the process.