For three years, the war in Ukraine has offered a brutal reminder of an old truth: wars are ultimately decided by production, not promises. Ammunition, air defenses, drones, spare parts, secure energy supplies, and logistics matter far more than summit declarations or alliance rhetoric. Yet Europe, the primary theatre of the conflict, still runs a defense economy designed for short production runs and not prolonged industrial warfare.

A second shock has now reinforced this reality: the release of President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy. The document makes clear that US security commitments are becoming more explicitly conditional, interest-driven, and politically contested. Together, these two forces—the industrial demands of Ukraine and America’s redefined strategic posture—are forcing an overdue reckoning. Europe can no longer assume that the United States will always underwrite the material foundations of its own defense. If Europe wants to remain strategically relevant, it needs to build a genuine war economy.

High-intensity conflict in the 21st century is brutally consumptive. Ukraine now fires ammunition at rates that would have been considered unsustainable in any Western planning scenario just a decade ago. Air defense interceptors, drones, armored vehicles, artillery barrels, and electronics are destroyed and replaced on a massive scale. Victory depends on industrial endurance, not exquisite platforms.

Yet Europe’s defense-industrial base has been optimized for efficiency, not surge. Production runs are short. Orders are fragmented across national lines. Stockpiles were allowed to shrink after the Cold War. Skilled labor migrated to civilian sectors. Energy costs and regulatory complexity hollowed out much of the heavy industrial ecosystem. As a result, even after three years of war on its doorstep, Europe still struggles to replace battlefield losses at speed, let alone sustain the output required for a long war of attrition.

This is not primarily a budget problem. European defense spending is rising rapidly. It is a production problem. Without long-term contracts, predictable energy access, secure supply chains, and trained workforces, more money often translates into debt rather than output. A war economy means something very specific: a permanent industrial posture designed for sustained military production under crisis conditions, with surge capacity built in before, and not after, the shooting intensifies.

Europe’s industrial........

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