Europe led a record international rise in defence spending last year, according to a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
European expenses rose in real terms by 17 percent to $693m, spearheading a global rise of 9.4 percent to $2.7 trillion, marking the highest level of defence spending since the fall of communism in Europe.
Russia’s war in Ukraine was the principal driver of the new trend, SIPRI said on Monday.
“The rapid spending increases among European NATO members were driven mainly by the ongoing Russian threat and concerns about possible US disengagement within the alliance,” said Jade Guiberteau Ricard, a researcher with SIPRI.
The protagonists in that war still bore the brunt of its expense.
Russia saw the biggest annual rise of any single country at 38 percent, as it suffered devastating material losses in its war in Ukraine. It spent $149bn, more than 7 percent of its economic output.
Ukraine spent its entire tax income of $64.7bn on its defence, and was the country devoting the biggest proportion of its economy – 34 percent – to the military.
But apparent US reluctance to continue to fund Ukraine’s defence means more of the burden may fall on Europe.
That might not be as onerous as it sounds. The size of the European Union economy meant that it needed to spend only 0.12 percent more of its gross domestic product (GDP) to replace US military support for Ukraine, the think tank Bruegel estimated last February.
‘We will see further increases’
Most of Europe’s defence spending increase, experts told Al Jazeera, addressed the need to rebuild defunct European militaries.
“The increase was expected, though it was still somewhat shocking to see it unfold,” retired US colonel Seth Krummrich said, as it reflected the end of US supremacy on the global stage.
Krummrich, who is now vice president of Global Guardian, a security consultant, believed this was the start of a new trend.
“I do believe we will see further increases in the years ahead. Europe recognises the need to stand on its own and not rely as heavily on the United States,” he said. “That’s not to say the US will not support Europe, but the ‘guaranteed certainty’ of US support is no longer felt.”
The EU last month relaxed deficit rules, allowing national budgets to spend an additional 650 billion euros ($740bn) on defence off the books.
Greece became the first member to announce a multiyear rearmament under the new rules on April 3.
Within Europe, Germany rose most steeply of all (by 28 percent), as an extraordinary 100-billion-euro ($113.5bn) fund announced in 2022 finally swung into action. However, every EU member state except Malta raised its defence budget, reflecting an increasingly widespread Russian threat perception.
The relaxed EU deficit rules, known as Rearm Europe, along with a 150-billion-euro ($170bn) fund to boost EU defence products and a German parliament decision last month to devote up to 1 trillion euros ($1.14 trillion) to infrastructure and defence all advocated in favour of what Krummrich predicted.
Militaries cannot live on money alone
Experts cautioned that expenditure would take a long time to translate into force projection.
“Major military capability takes years to develop,” said Lukas Milevski, a lecturer in international studies at Leiden University. “It takes time to train people, to buy the stuff, to build the stuff, to deliver the stuff,” he told Al Jazeera.
Germany, for example, promised Lithuania a brigade in 2022. Its barracks are built in southwest Lithuania, but the brigade is not expected to be manned, trained, equipped and operational until the end of 2027.
Milevski also cautioned that the money would have to be sustained over many years. “By the time you actually need to pay for the stuff, all those exemptions that came with Rearm Europe have expired, and the year-by-year continuation doesn’t provide the stability that defence policy needs,” he said.
Another concern is what the money is spent on. The staggering US defence budget of $997bn, for example, is often described as bloated with pork-barrel procurements rather than what a modern military needs.
Europe suffers from a similar problem of redundancy, with different states competing to have their tank or rocket launch system adopted as the EU standard and funded to great heights.
Krummrich believed the EU now enjoys a “significant opportunity” to avoid squabbling about which older systems to preserve, and “leap forward technologically through military innovation and investment”. It was enough, he said, to observe how “the dirt laboratory of Ukraine has revealed a new evolution in warfare, especially regarding drones and unmanned vehicles”.
Others expressed concern about Europe’s go-it-alone approach.
“It’s capabilities that matter, and how those capabilities are built and controlled,” said Hugo Bromley, an economy and geopolitical expert at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics.
The US and Europe should not be decoupling, but working together to provide specific needs in both Europe and the Asia Pacific, Bromley told Al Jazeera.
“The scarce assets America needs, particularly in an Indo-Pacific focus, are the very high-end [air]lift, missiles – capabilities that the current focus of European expenditure is not designed to create … because these are the capabilities that nation states wish most to keep to themselves,” he said.
“So we need to have an honest conversation about which countries are prepared to work together on these issues … and if you look at where our natural partners are to develop those high end capabilities, it is East Asia, Germany, to a lesser extent France and Britain, and what I think of as Commonwealth – so Australia, Canada.”
This internationalist approach is currently out of favour on the continent, where the concept of strategic autonomy now drives renewed European defence resolve.
Finally, there is concern that money, even if effectively spent over sufficient time to deliver force, is going to lead to tragedy in the Ukrainian theatre, which is largely depleted of its professional militaries.
“The operational map remains largely stagnant,” said Krummrich.
“Gone are the highly trained troops and great campaign plans. This is now a conscript war with negligible front-line movement,” he said, calling it a “meat grinder”.
“In my opinion, high spending will not turn the war decisively for either side; it will only result in further death.”
