Europe is spending more on defence, but the author says the real bottleneck is slow, fragmented procurement in a war that now changes in months. Ukraine, a possible U.S. “burden shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, and rapid tech are hitting at once; the old cycle (requirement → specs → contract → field years later) often delivers yesterday’s kit.

The proposed fix is ADIEM: governments as orchestrators of a loop linking forces, primes, start-ups, universities, and investors—measure success by how fast capability is imagined, built, tested, fielded, and updated, not by platforms off the line. Ukraine’s model: battlefield problem → prototype → soldier test → scale → next iteration (and cheap drones rewriting tactics).

How: joint planning shops that can break rules; hybrid buying (central big systems, units for urgent needs); small incremental contracts and open software; cheap mass (drones, loitering munitions, ISR, EW); talent that can compete with tech firms; standing experiment centres; a sovereign defence cloud and digital twins.

Europe is rearming. Defence budgets are rising, factories are expanding, and new EU instruments are pouring money into ammunition production and joint procurement. But money is only part of Europe’s defence problems. The main constraint is that its systems remain slow, fragmented and poorly suited to an age when military technology can change in months rather than decades.

Three transformations are hitting the continent at once. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back large-scale war to European soil. Washington’s growing focus on the Indo-Pacific, its renewed interest in Greenland and its push to move NATO from “burden sharing” towards what might be called “burden shifting” mean that Europe will have to provide not only more money for the alliance but also a larger share of its combat power. At the same time,........

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