2025/25 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||
Europe's military programmes: strategies, costs and trade-offs |
|||||||||||||||||
Futura D'Aprile, Martin Koehler, Paolo Maranzano, Mario Pianta, Francesco Strazzari |
|||||||||||||||||
Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
||||||||||||||||
EU programmes, military technologies, arms expenditure, economic performance
|
|||||||||||||||||
JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
||||||||||||||||
O30, O33, 038
|
|||||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
||||||||||||||||
This paper investigates the expansion of EU military activities,
involving the European Commission, other EU-related institutions and
Member States. Expenditure on EU military programmes - defence-related
R&D, arms production, joint procurement, military mobility, and the
supply of lethal weapons to third countries - has skyrocketed since
2021, well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with an increase of
about 350% from 2021 to 2024. The European Commission is playing a
growing role in developing initiatives in the defence domain, with
programmes such as the European Defence Fund that supports research
into and production of new weapons systems. In 2025, it announced the
plan ReArm Europe, later renamed Readiness 2030, to sustain the
further militarization of the EU. The largest arms-related programme,
however, is the European Peace Facility that is funded by EU Member
States - as opposed to previous actions funded by the EU budget - for
the supply of weapons, ammunitions and equipment to non-EU countries;
Ukraine has obtained € 5.6 billion of military supplies from the
European Peace Facility since the start of the war with Russia. EU
military programmes have spent a total amount of € 8.2 billion in 2023,
as opposed to € 200 million in 2019. The largest part of Europe's
military expenditure, however, is still found in national budgets. In
2024, NATO EU countries spent € 346 billion in their military budgets,
with an increase in real terms of 66% between 2013 and 2024. When we
consider the total spending of NATO EU countries and the major EU
economies - Germany, France, Italy and Spain - we find that in the
last decade the expansion of national military budgets, and
particularly the acquisition of new weapons and equipment, has
dramatically outpaced growth in GDP, total public expenditures and
spending on the environment, education and health. In a context of
widening conflicts, current political developments - in US policy and
within the EU - are accelerating the militarisation of European
policies without an adequate debate on real security needs, on the
model of EU integration in defence and on the economic dimensions of
the process.
|
Downloads
|
![]() ![]() |
|
![]()
|
![]() |