Insight
The EU’s Defence Readiness 2030 Roadmap: Ambition and constraints by Luigi Scazzieri, 29 October 2025 The Defence Readiness 2030 Roadmap seeks to accelerate and inject coherence into the EU’s defence build-up. Its success depends on sustained funding and political will. Europeans feel a genuine sense of fear. Russia is probing both Europe’s physical defences and its political cohesion with increasingly brazen ‘grey zone’ incursions and sabotage operations, while continuing its war on Ukraine. Meanwhile, the United States has made clear that Europeans will need to defend themselves with much less support from Washington in the future. In response, defence budgets are rising sharply in large parts of Europe. According to the latest figures from the European Defence Agency (EDA), EU-wide defence spending will reach 2.1 per cent in 2025, up from 1.6 per cent in 2023. Several European states are already well above that level, with Poland set to spend 4.48 per cent this year. Moreover, all NATO members – bar Spain – have pledged to increase overall defence and security-related spending to 5 per cent by 2035. However, spending increases will take time to result in concrete capabilities. For now, European armies continue to face large gaps in many areas, from air defence and long-range strike, to intelligence gathering and command and control capabilities, as well as personnel shortages. The effort to strengthen Europe’s defences also hinges on whether Europeans can avoid duplication and weave their efforts into a more coherent whole. National budgets and planning co-exist with a growing number of bilateral and minilateral formats, as well as NATO and EU initiatives – such as the European Defence Fund (EDF) to foster joint research or the €150 billion SAFE instrument to provide memberstates with low-interest long-term loans. While all these initiatives move broadly in the same direction, the challenge is ensuring their alignment to avoid duplication and maximise efficiency. The EU’s Defence Readiness 2030 Roadmap, released on October 16th, seeks to do precisely that, and bring greater coherence to Europe’s defence ramp-up. CER INSIGHT: THE EU’S DEFENCE READINESS 2030 ROADMAP: AMBITION AND CONSTRAINTS 29 October 2025
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