The recent wave of drone incursions across European skies has made one thing brutally clear: security now depends as much on production lines as on soldiers. The Continent is discovering that factories are the new frontline.
The European Union is finally putting its money where its mouth is. The €150 billion SAFE defence fund marks a decisive break with the old habit of outsourcing security to others. This week, Brussels even moved to open it to Britain and Canada, not out of charity but out of necessity. The task is too vast for the EU alone.
Events are driving this shift. Denmark’s airports were forced into lockdown after drones appeared overhead, the latest in a string of intrusions that look suspiciously like hybrid attacks. The response required radars, jammers and air defences costing millions. The lesson is stark: cheap drones expose expensive vulnerabilities, and Europe must scale its defences fast.
Romania’s proposal to co-produce drones with Ukraine is a glimpse of the future. Kyiv has hard-won battlefield experience; Romania sits on the edge of the storm. EU subsidies would knit together that expertise with industrial capacity, creating a model for pan-European arms production. What sounded fanciful only two years ago is rapidly becoming the new normal.
This industrial turn is spreading well beyond drones. The European Investment Bank has just approved €7.1 billion for dual-use technologies under its TechEU initiative, mixing satellites, cybersecurity and advanced materials with energy security and Ukraine’s reconstruction. Brussels is deliberately blurring the line between civil and military projects, treating defence as a driver of economic resilience.
Critics see danger here. They warn of subsidies funnelling into favoured firms, and of procurement rules being eroded. German MPs are already uneasy about large contracts being awarded without open competition, fearing waste and cronyism. These concerns matter — but they are unlikely to slow the momentum. Europe is at war by proxy, and political leaders are in no mood to let red tape dictate the pace.
France and Germany sit uneasily at the heart of this drive. Paris wants a protective shield for its national champions; Berlin pushes for wider competition to stretch budgets further. The SAFE fund’s openness to Britain and Canada reflects Berlin’s view, but the underlying tension remains. As always in Europe, industrial policy is inseparable from national pride.
Yet beneath the quarrels lies a cold calculation. Europe’s reliance on American weapons, laid bare by the war in Ukraine, cannot continue forever. Washington’s patience is not limitless, and the second Trump presidency is focusing minds. Unless Europe builds a serious defence industrial base — churning out drones, ammunition and air defences at scale — it risks finding itself dangerously exposed.
The change is already tangible. Ammunition plants in Eastern Europe are doubling shifts. Nordic firms are racing to design anti-drone systems. French shipyards are overloaded with orders. The message is clear: Europe cannot defend itself with rhetoric; it needs welders, engineers and assembly lines.
If Brussels gets this right, Europe could achieve what has eluded it for decades: a defence economy with genuine continental scale, freeing it from overdependence on Washington and giving leaders more strategic freedom. If it gets it wrong, the result will be a patchwork of underfunded armies, scrambling for overpriced imports, their security dictated from abroad.
What is striking is how quickly attitudes have changed. Only a few years ago, talk of a European arms race would have been dismissed as scaremongering. Today, with Russian drones buzzing airports and Zapad exercises rattling NATO’s frontier, few doubt the urgency.
Europe has chosen to treat defence as part of its industrial strategy — not a cost to be endured but an investment in survival. The Continent’s future security may well be decided not just in parliaments or summit halls, but in the factories now being retooled to arm it for the storm ahead.
Main Image: By locotenent Bogdan Rădulescu – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13740696
