statement<\/a> on Thursday. \u201cUkraine shows us that this does not take decades.\u201d<\/p>\nIn addition to Enders, the paper was signed by Jeannette zu F\u00fcrstenberg, president of venture-capital firm General Catalyst; economist Moritz Schularick, the president of the Kiel Institute; Airbus Chairman and former Deutsche Telekom CEO Ren\u00e9 Obermann; and security analyst and former defense staffer Nico Lange.<\/p>\n
\u201cA substantial part of the identified capability gaps can be addressed within a few years, provided that the appropriate political prioritization is in place,\u201d the authors wrote. \u201cThe prerequisite is that Europe understands the strategic dimension of its defense challenge as its \u2018Manhattan Project.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Substantial progress toward autonomous European capacity to act is realistic within three to five years, while \u201cfar-reaching autonomy\u201d is achievable within five to 10 years, on condition that goal is pursued as a political priority within a joint European effort, the paper said.<\/p>\n
Financing Europe\u2019s sovereignty is achievable with around 10% of total European defense spending, with the expenditure required over the next decade corresponding to about 0.25% of GDP, according to the five authors.<\/p>\n
The paper identified \u201cten central capability gaps\u201d Europe needs to plug to be able to act autonomously. Cost estimates for programs proposed in the paper are \u201cnecessarily subject to considerable uncertainty,\u201d with deviations in the range of 20% to 30% to be expected, the authors said.<\/p>\n
Establishing a European command-and-control capability could take three to four years and would cost anywhere from \u20ac10 billion to \u20ac20-plus billion, according to the paper. Europe lacks a counterpart to U.S. defense-technology company Palantir, and building a sovereign European C2 and battle-management system is a priority, using Ukraine\u2019s Delta system as a reference.<\/p>\n
Europe has largely missed Ukraine\u2019s paradigm shift to drone-dominated warfare, and building sufficient capacity in scaled autonomous systems could take three to five years, with a price tag of \u20ac30 billion or more.<\/p>\n
Action points include setting up mass-production capacity for several million drones and loitering munitions per year, according to the report. Another line of action would be to set up a major development program for unmanned ground vehicles involving the German automotive industry, land-systems makers and AI startups, and designed for serial production.<\/p>\n
Ground-based deep precision strike is another capability gap that could be filled in three to five years, within a cost envelope of \u20ac20 billion to \u20ac30 billion. Sixth-generation air combat systems would take 10 years or more and cost at least \u20ac200 billion, with that estimate including funding for two parallel sixth-generation development programs.<\/p>\n
Europe has a gap in air defense, particularly in affordable, large-scale counter-drone and short-range capability at the level of brigades, assets and infrastructure, according to the paper. Ballistic missile defense \u201cremains an equally critical gap.\u201d Initial operating effectiveness in air defense could take three to five years, while \u201cfull build-out\u201d that includes next-generation autonomous interceptors might require five to 10 years, for a total cost envelope of \u20ac50 billion.<\/p>\n
The paper also mentioned satellite reconnaissance, communications as well as positioning, navigation and timing as a capability gap, with the number one priority to build a European equivalent to Starlink.<\/p>\n
Other identified priority capability gaps are space launch; persistent airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; military cloud, software and AI; strategic airlift and military-operational support; as well as electronic warfare and suppression of enemy air defenses.<\/p>\n
Implementation should run through lead coalitions of countries, rather than a \u201cnew European super-structure,\u201d according to the authors.<\/p>\n
Europe further needs a paradigm shift in areas such as procurement, with prototype competitions rather than starting with hundreds of pages of specifications, the paper said. Contracts should reward outcomes rather than provide input specifications, focus on production capacity rather than number of units procured, while barriers to new entrants should be low, according to the authors.<\/p>\n
\u201cUkraine shows that a broad supplier landscape combining established and new actors is more resilient, faster and more cost-effective than relying on a few large prime contractors,\u201d the five authors wrote.<\/p>\n
Europe has the financial means, industrial base and technology to overcome its strategic dependencies, and the bottleneck is political will to coordinate, prioritize and break with \u201cdecades of fragmentation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are convinced that Europe\u2019s security will be decided by technological superiority and by the willingness to invest massively where it counts,\u201d the authors said. \u201cIf we build the central capabilities at the right place, Europe can protect itself against aggressors and produce credible deterrence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS \u2014 European sovereignty in defense and security is within reach and would require investing around \u20ac50 billion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1326,6942,1327,1322,151,722,60,5,478,774],"class_list":{"0":"post-11002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-circulated-defense-news","9":"tag-defense-spending","10":"tag-defense-news","11":"tag-dn-dnr","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-france","15":"tag-germany","16":"tag-nato","17":"tag-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}