PARIS — Europe can build up most of the critical defense enablers needed to deter or defeat Russia without U.S. support within five years, provided the political will to invest is there, according to security researchers and experts surveyed by Defense News.
European countries currently rely on the U.S. within the NATO alliance for a range of supporting capabilities and assets that allow combat forces to operate effectively. That dependency looks increasingly precarious as U.S. President Donald Trump signals willingness to abandon America’s long-time allies and align with Russia.
Without critical enablers now provided by the United States, such as battlefield command and control (C2), satellite intelligence and long-range strike, an alliance of European Union countries, the U.K. and Norway could still defeat Russia in a conventional conflict, but it would be a costlier and bloodier affair, according to several analysts.
“At a European level we’re actually not fully operational without those enablers,” said Sven Biscop, director of the Europe in the World program at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, but it would be much more improvised. Much bloodier, with more losses of people, of terrain also – so we have to solve that urgently.”
Military satellite communications is the area where Europe is closest to having sufficient capability, with unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) not far behind, based on the assessment of 17 experts from mostly Europe-based think tanks and institutions. Those capabilities are either in place or fewer than three years away, a majority said.
Defense News asked the experts how much time a European alliance will need to reach adequate capacity in nine defense enablers, in order to deter or successfully fight Russia without the U.S.
Battlefield command and control, long-range strike and suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) are all areas where most analysts expect Europe can achieve self sufficiency within five years. Space-based ISR stood out as the capability for which the respondents were least optimistic, with a majority considering Europe will need five to 10 years to have sufficient capacity to stop relying on the U.S.
“We’re almost completely dependent on U.S. intelligence for satellite and everything that goes with it,” Biscop said. “That will take some time to develop, we will need a number of years.”
The experts were divided on aerial refueling and strategic airlift, with one group considering that Europe has enough tanker aircraft and transport aircraft as it is, and another set of analysts considering the continent still needs three to five years to achieve sufficient mass.
Airborne surveillance was another area of divided assessments, with around half of the analysts considering that Europe has the capability in place or can achieve critical ability within three years, and the other half expecting that to take anywhere between three and 10 years.
All the estimates are contingent on European governments being willing to cough up the money required to build up the enablers, with only a handful of NATO members in Europe spending more than 2.5% of their GDP on defense in 2024, and nearly a third not meeting the 2% target set by NATO in 2014.
“It’s difficult to forecast the number and size of capabilities we would need to be fully efficient against Russia,” said Héloïse Fayet, a researcher at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales, where she’s in charge of deterrence and proliferation. “There are a lot of external variables, such as the political willingness to spend much more money on defense.”
Russia could be ready to attack a European Union country within three to ten years, researchers Alex Burilkov at Globsec GeoTech Center and Guntram Wolff at Bruegel wrote in a Feb. 21 analysis, citing assessments by NATO, Germany, Poland, Denmark and the Baltic states.
European NATO allies have time to prepare, but “this time must not be spent doing nothing, as Europe is used to doing,” said Léo Péria-Peigné, a researcher at IFRI who specializes in armament capacity, and who doesn’t expect Russia to be a threat to the EU for at least five years because of its losses of troops and equipment in Ukraine.
European solutions for enablers “are critically under-financed right now, and it would be foolish to say anything else, but they exist,” said Péria-Peigné. “So it can ramp up, and we have time to do so. How much time will Europe need to build up capacity? If everybody is actually doing instead of talking, in five years it will be pretty solid.”
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