Orchestrators, not customers: A new role for European governments in defence

Orchestrators, not customers: A new role for European governments in defence Weapons that took decades to develop can now be countered within months. European governments need to stop buying finished platforms and start running an innovation cycle, in which soldiers learn from one system and build these lessons into the next 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, technology is changing warfare faster than traditional procurement systems can keep up. At present, procurement systems work as follows: a military identifies a requirement; officials draw up specifications; companies compete for a contract and, years later, a system enters service. The problem is that, by then, the technologies shaping the battlefield may have changed dramatically. Promising technologies can become obsolete or fall by the wayside before they ever reach soldiers. Ukraine has demonstrated a different model. Operational problems generate ideas; engineers turn them into prototypes; soldiers test them; manufacturers improve and scale them; battlefield experience feeds into the next iteration. Technology can also work in the other direction: new capabilities, such as cheap drones, can create tactics that planners had not previously considered. Europe needs to make this cycle permanent. I propose a model called Adaptive Defence Industrial Ecosystem Management, or ADIEM. The principle is for governments to move from being regulators and buyers to orchestrators of a defence ecosystem that links governments, armed forces, defence and tech companies, start-ups, universities and investors in a continuous loop. The real measure of defence-industrial success should not be how many platforms roll off the line, but how fast capability can be imagined, built, tested, industrialised, fielded and adapted again. Industrial resilience and human capital are central to this model. Ukraine has shown that sustained operations depend on raw materials, reliable energy, resilient logistics and skilled labour quite as much as on the platforms themselves. And because digital capability now depends as much on software and data engineering as on heavy manufacturing, Europe’s defence sector competes directly with the commercial tech industry for the same scarce talent. This makes the appeal of a defence career a strategic question. How to make ADIEM work Reform defence governance. Create permanent structures that bring together military planning, industrial policy, innovation and procurement around shared capability goals. Give them room to depart from standard rules where those rules are the obstacle. Start with battlefield problems. Build capabilities around what armed forces need to achieve. It works in reverse too: a new system needs a concept of operations written for it before it is bought at scale. Treat these as living documents that evolve with experimentation and real-world lessons. Make procurement faster and more flexible. Use a hybrid procurement method. While central procurement agencies buy major systems, individual units are allowed to meet certain urgent combat needs. Alongside that, break large procurements into smaller contracts with incremental delivery, allow continuous software updates, use open architecture and speed up certification. Build a genuine innovation ecosystem. Give start-ups, universities and public labs clear routes to deployment. Reward experimentation and operational relevance over novelty for its own sake. Achieve affordable mass. Create dedicated programmes for weapon systems that are effective enough, cheap enough to buy in large numbers and simple enough to replace quickly. These include drones, autonomous vehicles, loitering munitions, low-cost intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and electronic warfare. Invest in human capital. Build a long-term pipeline of software engineers, AI specialists, systems engineers and skilled production workers, and change how the sector is perceived—presenting it as a high-technology field, not just a traditional military one. Institutionalise experimentation. Set up permanent centres where soldiers, engineers, researchers and industry jointly evaluate new operational concepts and technologies. Test continuously rather than only in the run-up to a procurement decision. Develop digital defence infrastructure. Invest in a sovereign defence cloud, secure data architecture, digital twins and common digital standards. Governments also need to reform the institutions through which capability is developed, not just the funding lines that feed them. And while Europe has much of what it needs—sophisticated armed forces, world-class manufacturers, strong universities and a growing defence-tech sector—it still lacks a system capable of connecting them quickly enough. That is the purpose of ADIEM: to connect these actors in a continuously adapting ecosystem, with governments acting as orchestrators rather than simply regulators and buyers. The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.