Why Spending Without Industrial Architecture Deepens Dependency
European defense spending is rising rapidly, but increased expenditure without the industrial and institutional architectures to absorb it does not produce autonomy — it produces dependency. The money flows to whoever already has the production architecture, which is predominantly the United States. This dynamic has two compounding failure modes: external dependency on American contractors, and internal fragmentation across 27 separate European procurement systems.
This is structurally identical to a premature market failure: capital and political demand exist, but the surrounding system has not co-evolved to convert them into the intended output. European defense is experiencing a premature rearmament — a politically-driven spending surge into an industrial architecture that cannot yet absorb it productively. Increasing the budget does not resolve this; it amplifies it.
Genuine European defense autonomy requires an architecture-first approach: building European industrial capacity, harmonizing procurement, and developing interoperability standards before or alongside spending increases. Without the right sequencing, increased spending accelerates dependency rather than resolving it.