While the advertisements of European defense budgets follow one another since the invasion of Ukraine, a structural fracture is widening between two approaches, with the west, technocratic prudence sometimes hampered by strategic traditions, and in the east, an accelerated mobilization, which is essential due to the geopolitical urgency. If Europe speaks with a single voice in Brussels, it does not invest neither at the same pace nor with the same vision.
Since 2022, Eastern Europe has imposed itself as the epicenter of a pragmatic and assumed rearmament. Poland has brought its defense budget to almost 4 % of GDP, has multiplied orders abroad, and restructure its industry around a goal to build a credible short -term deterrence. Far from industrial integration reflexes or calls for strategic autonomy, Warsaw quickly buys, massively, and without technological taboo. In Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania, the dynamics are similar, these countries cooperate closely with the United States, test systems in real conditions, integrate startups like Helsing in their programs, and favor direct interoperability with NATO.
Western Europe is advancing counted. France displays an ambitious military programming law, but struggles to industrialize its response to the technological ruptures observed on the Ukrainian front. The SCAF (Air combat system of the future), co-developed with Germany and Spain, remains symptomatic of this inertia with slippery deadlines, endless technical arbitrations, and a chronic incapacity to get out of a framework thought for peacetime. Germany, despite the announcement of a special fund of 100 billion euros, sees most of its credits absorbed by existing programs. Reorientation towards modern capacities (drones, electronic war, tactical software) remains marginal, and industrial dynamics is still widely captured by large historic groups, to the detriment of technological agility.
This divergence reveals a deep difference in perception of risk. To the east, the war is tangible, border, immediate while in the west, it remains abstract, distant, sometimes treated from a more than strategic budgetary angle. Where Tallinn or Vilnius are already incorporating distributed war doctrines and low -cost technologies, Paris and Berlin continue to favor “exquisite” weapons systems, with a long and expensive development cycle.
This results in increasing tension in European industrial governance. The emerging defense ecosystem is no longer limited to the Paris / Berlin / Rome triangle. Warsaw captures the attention of South Korean, American and Israeli industrialists, and the Baltic States become experimentation grounds for new entrants, whether California or British. The Anglo-Saxon venture capital, hitherto chilly in European defense, is beginning to take an interest in startups from the eastern zone, as the budgets open and the doctrines are clarified.
This realignment raises a decisive question, can Western Europe still claim to pilot the continent’s defense strategy if it does not radically transform its investment mechanisms, its purchasing criteria, and its political tempo? Because behind the announcements of 5 % of the GDP devoted to defense by 2035, it is another dynamic that is played out and that of an Eastern Europe which, by being more reactive, more aligned with operational realities, could well become the new industrial gravity of European defense.
