Strategic autonomy without strategic depth? European defence supply chains,military-industrial cooperation,and the central and eastern European constraint

Introduction

The resurgence of high-intensity ground combat in Europe has intersected with renewed political traction for the concept of strategic autonomy in defence and security. European responses to the Ukraine conflict have prioritized operational adjustments, including force deployments and training support, while industrial adaptation has lagged behind since the onset of the war (Ratti, 2023). Shortfalls in key domains such as ammunition production, component sourcing, labour availability, and international procurement coordination highlight the enduring mismatch between strategic intent and industrial capacity. This discrepancy cannot be reduced to a lack of political will or inconsistency in official discourse. Underlying the disparity is a structural fragmentation of Europe’s defence-industrial base, shaped by disjointed national acquisition policies and unequal capacity distribution, which collectively compromise the integrity of critical supply networks. Through a political-economy framework, this study explores the systemic limitations confronting European strategic autonomy, with attention to defence supply chains, intergovernmental industrial coordination, and regional disparities in manufacturing capabilities. The argument advanced is that European strategic autonomy is hindered more by structural shortcomings in defence-industrial robustness and logistical integration than by political disengagement. Nowhere are these structural constraints more evident than in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where heightened threat perceptions contrast with limited defence-industrial autonomy (Helwig, 2023). This perspective recasts strategic autonomy as a functional capability, rooted in the material capacity to deliver sustained procurement, maintenance, and replenishment even under conditions of disruption and strategic stress (Droff and Malizard, 2023).

This study is driven by a central research question: how do fragmented defence supply chains and asymmetrical industrial capacities impede Europe’s advancement toward strategic autonomy, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe? Although theoretically driven, the article integrates empirical observations drawn from well-documented post-2022 developments. The case of Ukraine is not framed as a narrative of battlefield adaptation, but as a structural stress test of Europe’s defence-industrial performance under prolonged strain. This research generates three key insights with broader theoretical and practical implications. First, the article reframes strategic autonomy as a material and infrastructural challenge rooted in supply-chain dynamics, rather than as a function of strategic culture or military planning. Second, it conceptualizes CEE as a diagnostic locus within Europe’s defence-industrial ecosystem, where high-intensity security pressures confront limited endogenous production capacity and procurement dependence on external actors. Third, it employs the Ukraine war as empirical evidence that Europe’s ability to adapt militarily has surpassed its capacity to mobilize defence-industrial resources, exposing structural impediments to achieving strategic autonomy as a tangible capability.

The analysis unfolds through the following structure. The second section frames ongoing debates on strategic autonomy while explicating the notion of structural constraints from a political-economic standpoint. The third section investigates Europe’s defence-industrial linkages and cooperative political economy, drawing attention to disjointed networks, production scale challenges, and supply-side chokepoints. The fourth section elaborates on how Central and Eastern Europe functions as a structural impediment to cohesive defence-industrial integration in Europe. The fifth section analyzes the war in Ukraine as a diagnostic event revealing the limitations of Europe’s land-warfare production and logistical endurance. The concluding section distills key insights for European security policy, inter-state military cooperation, and the evolving research agenda on strategic autonomy.

Strategic autonomy: Concept, ambition, and structural limits

Now occupying a focal position in European security and defence narratives, the notion of strategic autonomy remains a subject of considerable contention. Despite its pervasive usage in official strategies and scholarly discourse, the meaning attributed to it fluctuates according to the chosen level of analysis and ideological lens. Broadly construed, strategic autonomy encapsulates the capacity of a governing body to independently formulate and implement collective agendas, unimpeded by external constraints (Tocci, 2021). Initially situated within the sphere of foreign and security policy harmonization, the concept has gradually extended its reach into defence, digital innovation, and industrial competitiveness debates within the EU. The concept’s evolution signals a heightened awareness that meaningful autonomy necessitates capacities beyond the diplomatic and military decision-making spheres. In security and defence deliberations, strategic autonomy is often framed as Europe’s ability to execute military missions, enhance defence readiness, and maintain control over key enablers without significant reliance on non-EU actors (Biscop, 2018). These conceptualizations foreground the importance of operational autonomy and sovereign decision-making, typically assessed through command structures, force projection capabilities, and control over enabling assets. Yet, these perspectives risk downplaying the infrastructural and industrial bases essential to effective defence capabilities. Operational autonomy is intrinsically linked to the ability to maintain force readiness over prolonged periods, especially in high-intensity scenarios characterized by accelerated depletion of munitions, spare components, and logistical support. Strategic decision-making autonomy is substantially undermined when replenishment, maintenance, and manufacturing capabilities are contingent on external providers whose reliability may be compromised during geopolitical crises.

A political economy lens shifts the analytical focus from rhetorical aspirations to the underlying material infrastructures that enable strategic action. Defence extends beyond traditional statecraft, constituting a complex industrial ecosystem shaped by protracted development cycles, substantial sunk costs, regulatory oversight, and entrenched technological trajectories (Hartley and Belin, 2019). These capacities emerge from decades of targeted investment, technical workforce development, secure supply chain certification, and organizational know-how that cannot be easily reconstituted. These systemic attributes delineate the boundaries of strategic autonomy, as industrial fragmentation may persist even amidst political alignment on security priorities, undermining collective readiness and deterrence. The critical inquiry, in this context, is less about Europe’s aspirations for autonomy and more about the material feasibility of meeting the operational demands inherent in its security posture. This conceptual shift helps elucidate why strategic autonomy should not be conflated with autarky or comprehensive disengagement from global interdependencies. The European defence sector has long relied on internationalized production ecosystems, with critical dependencies in areas such as advanced subsystems, propulsion energetics, digital electronics, and defence software. The core challenge is not to eradicate interdependence but to mitigate strategic vulnerabilities that arise within complex, interlinked systems. Contemporary literature on power and interdependence provides a valuable conceptual framework for linking strategic autonomy with global structural dynamics. The notion of weaponized interdependence underscores the strategic significance of network topologies and chokepoint control in conditioning both influence and vulnerability within globalized architectures (Farrell and Newman, 2019). Defence supply chains exemplify a specific articulation of this logic, being shielded in part by national security exemptions and export regulations, yet still reliant on transnational linkages for essential components and technologies.

Strategic autonomy reaches its structural constraint where assertions of political sovereignty confront the realities of a fragmented industrial base. Sovereign authority over procurement, standardization, and industrial planning constrains the aggregation of defence demand, while disjointed acquisition practices impede the achievement of scale efficiencies. Consequently, Europe continues to rely on external actors for critical capabilities and foundational inputs, despite persistent political narratives advocating strategic autonomy. The contradiction arises not from oversight, but from the systemic balancing of competing logics, national industrial protectionism, divergent threat perceptions, and alliance dependencies, within a fragmented political union. The post-2022 geopolitical context has sharpened pre-existing frictions within Europe’s strategic and industrial landscape. The full-scale Russian offensive against Ukraine prompted a significant uptick in European military budgets and acquisitions, though this has not been accompanied by a commensurate rise in industrial autonomy. EU member states collectively allocated 343 billion EUR to defence in 2024, a figure projected to increase in 2025, while procurement expenditure rose to 88 billion EUR, with expectations of exceeding 100 billion EUR (Council of the European Union, 2025). Aggregate spending increases coexist uneasily with institutional disunity, reflected in asynchronous procurement calendars, divergent capability specifications, and restricted cross-border industrial integration. The outcome illustrates a recurrent dilemma, rising defence budgets without accompanying consolidation tend to exacerbate inefficiencies, prolong delivery schedules, and entrench reliance rather than mitigate it.

Varying national threat assessments across Europe introduce additional complexity into the already contested debate over strategic autonomy. For numerous Central and Eastern European states, the proximate threat posed by Russia elevates the strategic value of rapid response, operational dependability, and a credible deterrence posture. Under these conditions, the transatlantic alliance, and especially the United States, remains the central pillar of deterrence and defence assurance. The spatial configuration of security threats directly informs acquisition strategies and shapes national defence-industrial agendas. When immediate capability delivery is paramount, CEE states may opt for reliable extra-European providers rather than invest in slower-developing European industrial alternatives. This pattern transcends political contestation, manifesting as an industrial misalignment where the urgency of frontline readiness perpetuates external reliance and cements long-term logistical partnerships (Lavery et al., 2022). From a conceptual perspective, CEE serves as a key locus for understanding the tensions and trade-offs shaping strategic autonomy debates. Autonomy attains strategic significance only if it resonates in high-risk regions with sustained demand for conventional land warfare capabilities. Paradoxically, the areas facing the most acute threats are also those marked by insufficient industrial depth and heightened urgency in procurement. This nexus between strategic vulnerability and production capacity lays bare the practical boundaries of autonomy more vividly than rhetorical or theoretical debate. This article conceptualizes structural limits as constraints arising from three interconnected dynamics: disaggregated demand shaped by nationally siloed procurement, disparities in industrial depth and specialization across the continent, and enduring dependencies on external supply chains for critical components and advanced subsystems. Structural limits reveal themselves under duress, particularly as consumption intensifies, logistical cycles shorten, and political expectations regarding availability confront operational realities. The conflict in Ukraine has starkly illuminated the tension between Europe’s strategic intent and the resource infrastructures necessary for its implementation.

Defence supply chains and military-industrial cooperation in Europe

The defence industrial base relies on vertically integrated supply networks composed of a few dominant prime contractors and extensive tiers of niche suppliers responsible for critical subsystems and support functions. The production of land systems and munitions involves an extended supply chain that includes not only final integration but also energetics, such as propellants and explosives, alongside mechanical components, safety mechanisms, and accredited testing facilities. Marked by significant fixed costs, strict compliance regimes, and extended approval processes, these production ecosystems pose structural impediments to new entrants and swift capacity expansion. This results in entrenched path dependencies within defence supply networks, where the loss of production capacity or line closures renders regeneration prohibitively slow and expensive. The configuration of defence supply chains is governed by a political economy shaped by three salient features. The first defining feature is the sovereign nature of demand, concentrated in the hands of states that function as primary buyers, enforcing authority through acquisition policies, national security carve-outs, and export constraints. National security concerns impose limits on competitive dynamics, restricting cross-border market access and reinforcing the fragmentation of defence production along national lines. The third feature is the entanglement of defence production with broader industrial strategy, wherein procurement reflects political-economic priorities such as job creation, technological sovereignty, and alliance structures rather than market pricing alone (Hartley and Belin, 2019). These characteristics set defence markets apart from civilian manufacturing sectors and clarify why price signals alone are insufficient to stimulate rapid capacity growth in volatile strategic environments.

These aforementioned dynamics have long informed the trajectory of defence-industrial integration efforts within Europe. Despite the presence of transnational projects, collaborative efforts remain limited by persistent home bias, offset-driven procurement logics, and the domestic political weight of national defence industries (Hartley, Collaboration and European defence industrial policy, 2008). Multinational initiatives in the defence sector frequently employ a workshare framework that seeks to balance industrial gains across contributing member states. While often essential for political consensus, this distributional logic may induce industrial fragmentation, parallel capacity development, and cost inflation, which in turn constrain efficiency and disrupt supply-chain coherence. Rather than reflecting bureaucratic inefficiency, fragmentation represents a structural equilibrium shaped by the interplay between state autonomy, domestic economic priorities, and pan-European strategic objectives. This equilibrium, when assessed through procurement theory, produces entrenched inefficiencies rooted in fragmented decision-making and misaligned incentives. Despite formal political alignment, the heterogeneity of national procurement systems, evident in misaligned timelines, technical specifications, and approval procedures, complicates collective acquisition strategies. Transaction cost economics posits that when defence assets are highly specialized and future conditions are uncertain, governance risks escalate, disincentivizing shared procurement arrangements (Smith, 2022). Applied to Europe, this rationale sustains fragmented national procurement streams in lieu of integrated production strategies, thereby constraining scale efficiencies and disincentivizing supplier investment in scalable output.

In the wake of the 2022 security crisis, the European Union has undertaken more overt institutional initiatives aimed at mitigating these procurement constraints. The European Defence Fund (EDF) was established to stimulate joint research and capability-building initiatives through the co-financing of cross-border defence projects (European Union, 2021). Emerging EU frameworks now aim to address critical chokepoints in defence acquisition and manufacturing capacity (European Union, 2023a, 2023b). The European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) deepens the discourse by positioning military preparedness within an industrial framework, emphasizing the operational demands of high-intensity warfare and advocating for stable demand signals, resilient supply networks, and strategic reinforcement of the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (European Commission, 2024a). These measures stem from a common recognition that the fragmented nature of Europe’s defence market undermines its capacity to generate economies of scale, rapid responsiveness, and systemic resilience in times of strategic duress. Yet the core structural impediment lies not only in insufficient collaboration but in the complex operational dynamics of integrating defence supply chains. Sustained defence manufacturing depends on stable multi-year procurement forecasts, harmonized technical norms, and transnational contracting frameworks that extend into the deeper layers of the supplier ecosystem. Capacity augmentation is contingent on risk-sharing arrangements, notably forward purchase commitments and institutionalized long-term contracting mechanisms. In the absence of coordinated mechanisms, increased budgets may exacerbate national procurement rivalries, strain critical input availability, and yield disjointed capabilities instead of coherent industrial consolidation.

Ammunition manufacturing exemplifies these dynamics in especially stark and revealing terms. The European Commission’s ASAP report reveals that, while the EU and Norway had a functional 155 mm artillery output baseline, escalation to conflict-relevant volumes required coordinated support to overcome systemic delays and critical input chokepoints (European Commission, 2024b). Constraints in the fabrication of propellants are traced in the report to supply vulnerabilities in key energetic substances, notably nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine. Due to tight environmental regulations, oversight mechanisms, and the need for technically advanced facilities, scaling production of these precursor materials is structurally challenging. Shortfalls in energetic inputs may stall the entire production process, even when end-stage integration is functional, representing a paradigmatic case of supply-chain chokepoint dependence. From a political economy standpoint, market mechanisms alone, particularly price signals, are insufficient to alleviate chokepoint vulnerabilities amidst heightened strategic ambiguity. The defence sector is characterized by volatile procurement cycles, regulatory complexity, and capital intensiveness, whereas governments frequently delay sustained commitments amid electoral turnover and budgetary volatility. Cross-border acquisition processes are hampered by regulatory heterogeneity and domestic prioritization, which delay contract finalization and deter collaborative infrastructure investment. The mismatch between strategic awareness and industrial responsiveness becomes pronounced during crises, revealing the time lag only once supply chains are stressed and stockpiles exhausted.

European rearmament has proceeded against the backdrop of a partially globalized acquisition ecosystem, characterized by cross-border sourcing and uneven integration. Rising European defence budgets have not curtailed external dependencies, with major procurement streams continuing to benefit extra-European firms across critical domains like air defence, fifth-generation aviation, and advanced surveillance architectures. While these acquisitions address urgent operational needs, they simultaneously create structural reliance on external providers for sustainment elements such as personnel training, software maintenance, and logistical support. The analytical focus shifts from normative questions about global procurement to the structural implications of such sourcing within a fragmented and unevenly capacitated European defence landscape. While global sourcing can mitigate acute shortfalls, it also deepens long-term reliance on external actors, thereby constraining the strategic autonomy of Europe’s defence-industrial base. The configuration of European defence supply chains exposes a core dilemma in debates over strategic autonomy. While political acknowledgement and policy initiatives have grown, the foundational structure of the defence industry continues to reflect entrenched national divisions and stratified production layers. Without institutionalized demand consolidation, vertical supply-chain coherence, and targeted interventions in upstream vulnerabilities, fiscal expansion alone will prove insufficient to overcome structural impediments.

Central and eastern Europe as a structural constraint

CEE serves as a key empirical locus through which the structural impediments to European strategic autonomy can be interrogated. The region’s analytical relevance arises not from marginality or institutional deviation, but from its embodiment of three critical stressors: pronounced exposure to external threats, urgency in capability acquisition, and uneven defence-industrial development. These dynamics position CEE not as a peripheral anomaly but as a critical diagnostic arena for assessing the viability of European strategic autonomy under conditions of acute geopolitical strain. CEE countries are confronted with acute security spillovers stemming from Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, compounded by the intensifying militarization of the broader European strategic landscape (Kaunert & De Deus Pereira, 2023). For NATO’s eastern member states, deterrence constitutes an immediate strategic necessity rather than a distant conceptual objective. The urgency of the threat environment accelerates decision-making cycles and elevates the salience of capabilities geared toward land combat, integrated air and missile defence, and prolonged operational sustainability. In this context, strategic autonomy is evaluated not in terms of aspirational industrial trajectories but by the capacity to generate and deploy credible military force with speed and consistency.

Increased threat salience precipitates urgent procurement imperatives. For governments in CEE, strategic imperatives frequently compel a focus on procurement speed, logistical availability, and seamless integration with allied defense systems, typically favoring vendors considered dependable in conflict scenarios. In effect, this orientation has resulted in sustained reliance on U.S. capabilities and a notable pivot toward South Korean suppliers for high-end defence equipment (Davidson, 2026). From both administrative and political-economic standpoints, such procurement choices constitute rational reactions to external threat perceptions, rather than expressions of ideological alignment. However, such practices entail structural implications, as accelerated external procurement often entrenches enduring dependencies in sustainment domains such as spare parts, munitions, training infrastructure, software maintenance, and modernization cycles. CEE’s defence-industrial capacity is marked by disparities and lacks symmetrical development across the region. The region’s defence sectors continue to reflect Cold War inheritances, particularly in the areas of weapons manufacturing, ammunition production, and technical engineering capacities (Chovančík and Krpec, 2023). Nonetheless, such capacities are typically dispersed, narrowly specialized, and embedded within secondary tiers of production rather than autonomous, full-cycle manufacturing systems. Overall, the region lacks the tightly integrated ecosystem of design control, upstream component production, and platform-level integration that defines the most advanced Western European defence hubs. Consequently, the industrial role of CEE within the broader European defence architecture remains limited and reliant on external inputs, despite the region’s elevated security imperatives.

CEE thus emerges not as a marginal case but as a structurally embedded constraint within the continent’s defence-industrial configuration. The viability of European strategic autonomy ultimately depends on its credibility along the eastern frontier, where deterrence necessitates robust ground capabilities, logistical resilience, and continuous preparedness. Yet the present structure of Europe’s defence-industrial landscape is insufficiently harmonized with the needs posed by this challenge. A small cluster of Western European prime defence contractors cannot independently sustain production, maintenance, and resupply for the most exposed regions when operational demand is primarily fulfilled through external procurement pathways. This underscores a spatial disconnect between the regions requiring the most urgent defence capabilities and the areas where industrial robustness is concentrated. CEE’s post-2022 acquisition behavior highlights the inherent tension between urgent capability needs and long-term industrial autonomy. The trajectory of Poland’s defence modernization is illustrative of broader regional trends. Driven by a heightened sense of external threat, Poland has undertaken a rapid military buildup via major procurement programmes, combining South Korean heavy platforms with U.S. air defence and aviation assets (Paik, 2024). These acquisitions indicate a deliberate emphasis on swift capability enhancement amid escalating threat perceptions. Rather than focusing on their short-term operational utility, the significance of these decisions lies in how they reconfigure the future architecture of defence production and support. Procurement from abroad frequently leads to dependency in adjacent areas, such as maintenance, modernization, and ammunition supply, thereby challenging efforts to develop strategic autonomy rooted in industrial capability.

Despite existing constraints, CEE maintains a foundation of industrial assets that could be further leveraged. Significant industrial assets exist across the region, including munitions factories, armoured vehicle assembly lines, sustainment facilities, and an increasingly integrated private defence industry, notably in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Michelot and Šuplata, 2016). These capabilities are not inherently linked to an overarching European supply-chain architecture, limiting their systemic contribution. The defence-industrial landscape continues to exhibit fragmentation across national boundaries as well as within the various tiers of the supply chain. Access to cross-border procurement systems is often limited for sub-tier suppliers, who also contend with financing difficulties and stringent certification processes. The availability of upstream materials, most notably energetics and precision components, remains exposed to chokepoints within the supply chain. The region struggles to generate the scale and coordination needed to support autonomous ramp-up in production during strategic stress. Recent defence-industrial investments reflect a dual dynamic of potential and limitation. Rheinmetall’s investments in ammunition manufacturing in Eastern Europe exemplify the reorientation of production infrastructure toward frontline regions and affirm CEE’s increasing relevance in European defence planning (Foy, 2025). At the same time, these trends highlight how capacity expansion remains largely driven by the strategic decisions of major prime contractors, rather than by cohesive, regionally coordinated European planning. This configuration threatens to replicate a centre-periphery model whereby CEE is confined to lower-tier production tasks, while strategic authority and high-end integration remain the preserve of established Western hubs.

The political-economic configuration of CEE presents additional limitations on the realization of European strategic autonomy. The credibility of U.S. guarantees and the acquisition of U.S. defence systems are often seen by eastern flank states as central to deterrence, functioning alongside, not in place of, European security initiatives. This viewpoint can elicit caution or resistance to autonomy discourse insofar as it is perceived to imply decoupling from NATO or undermining transatlantic solidarity (Meijer and Brooks, 2021). The trajectory of procurement directly influences the scope and viability of future industrial integration efforts in Europe. When frontline states rely heavily on external suppliers, the European defence market remains disjointed, collective procurement fails to achieve critical mass, and logistical support systems remain uncoordinated. Thus, CEE serves as a focal point for the inherent contradiction embedded within the project of European strategic autonomy. CEE simultaneously generates the highest demand for military build-up while exemplifying the structural dependencies that inhibit European strategic autonomy. Strategic autonomy cannot be meaningfully assessed without analytically engaging with the underlying asymmetry, rooted in threat exposure, procurement pressures, and industrial fragmentation. In this sense, CEE functions as a key indicator of whether European defence-industrial coordination can effectively channel resources to the regions facing the greatest strategic pressure.

Ukraine, land warfare, and the limits of European rearmament

Rather than treating Ukraine as a case of combat innovation, the article positions it as a critical test of Europe’s defence-industrial resilience and institutional responsiveness. The analysis centres not on battlefield performance, but on the ability of European defence-industrial systems to withstand prolonged, high-tempo consumption and meet accelerated replenishment demands. The conflict since February 2022 has underscored that the material components of land warfare, ranging from artillery shells to maintenance infrastructure, serve as core determinants of battlefield endurance. The core issue for strategic autonomy is whether European industry can operationalize political momentum and fiscal expansion into timely and sufficiently scaled output. From a mobilisation standpoint, Ukraine reveals the tension between short-term operational flexibility and long-term industrial mobilisation capacity. Force posture, training deployment, and aid mechanisms were swiftly adjusted by European states in the wake of emerging operational demands. Defence-industrial systems, by comparison, responded more gradually, constrained by inherent characteristics such as extended production timelines, specialized infrastructure, regulatory burdens, and disjointed procurement governance. Understanding this asymmetry is essential to grasping how the war highlights structural limits to strategic autonomy that cannot be resolved through political will alone.

Among defence-industrial domains, ammunition production most clearly exemplifies the structural limits under discussion. The EU’s March 2023b strategy outlined a tripartite mechanism to deliver one million rounds of artillery to Ukraine within a year, merging national stock drawdowns, joint acquisition efforts, and scaled-up manufacturing (Council of the European Union, 2023). Although symbolically important, the initiative’s execution highlighted the systemic constraints inherent in Europe’s defence production capacity. Acquisition processes were disjointed across member states, contract issuance lacked temporal alignment, and suppliers remained unsure whether demand would persist beyond the short-term crisis context. By early 2024, European Commission figures indicated that the continent’s annual output of 155 mm shells had risen to nearly one million, reflecting tangible momentum in defence-industrial scaling (European Commission, 2024a). At the same time, this progress revealed structural limitations, scaling to wartime levels had only recently become possible, relied heavily on public-sector support, and faced persistent upstream bottlenecks. The response demonstrated real capacity for growth under pressure, but its fragility was evident in persistent structural impediments to rapid adaptation and systemic resilience.

What has proven most limiting is not assembly line output alone, but the robustness of the upstream and midstream supply network. The ASAP implementation report by the Commission highlights propellant manufacturing as a critical chokepoint, driven by shortages of essential energetic compounds such as nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine (European Commission, 2024b). These materials are manufactured in tightly regulated facilities, where safety, environmental, and certification constraints pose significant barriers to swift capacity expansion. Even with operational shell assembly lines, deficits in energetic materials can bring production to a standstill. Upstream dependency reveals a systemic vulnerability, defence industrial capacity is conditioned by the most constrained segment of the supply chain. Efforts to reconstitute land warfare capabilities highlight structural limitations in the scale and adaptability of European defence production. Scholarly and policy assessments indicate that low-volume procurement across a non-integrated European defence sector has inflated costs, delayed deliveries, and hindered rapid output expansion (Besch, 2025). Output across several critical European defence systems would require exponential scaling to satisfy deterrence-driven needs, yet delivery lags of 3 years or more remain common despite heightened demand (Burilkov et al., 2025). Such outcomes illustrate that the challenge lies in foundational design, not episodic pressures, wartime throughput cannot be achieved on demand within peacetime-optimized industrial frameworks.

The conflict also laid bare a structural misalignment between pre-war defence-industrial planning paradigms and the operational conditions on the battlefield. Before 2022, much of European and transatlantic defence planning was oriented toward high-end weapons technologies, precision-strike capabilities, and sophisticated force platforms. Although such systems proved tactically consequential, the extended duration of the conflict rapidly shifted the war toward a logic of industrial attrition. Prolonged artillery duels, high rates of equipment attrition, and persistent wear on armoured systems shifted the strategic emphasis toward volume, rapid replenishment, and sustainment capacity rather than technological sophistication per se (Hellemeier, 2025). Consequently, traditional military capabilities, particularly 155 mm artillery ammunition, surfaced as critical constraints despite their relative technological simplicity. This development exposed an underlying structural weakness in Western defence-industrial architectures. Manufacturing systems optimized for limited-scale, technologically advanced production were poorly aligned with the requirements of continuous, high-intensity conflict (Calcara et al., 2023). Production capacities for advanced platforms and precision-guided munitions proved insufficient to keep pace with operational consumption, necessitating a shift toward simpler, scalable capabilities. From this perspective, the Ukraine war illustrated that, in high-intensity conflict, strategic autonomy is determined less by technological sophistication than by the ability to maintain industrial output over time. These shortages compelled the adoption of emergency procurement measures, thereby illuminating the structural limits of Europe’s industrial capacity. Throughout the conflict, Ukraine and allied actors repeatedly relied on the swift activation of ammunition reserves and manufacturing capacity in Central and Eastern Europe, with transfers from countries including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, frequently facilitated by the United States (Chovančík and Krpec, 2023). Such improvised arrangements reinforce the article’s core argument that, in attritional warfare, strategic autonomy depends not on declaratory policy commitments but on the ability to activate industrial production across fragmented and politically constrained supply chains.

The Ukraine war constitutes an especially severe stress test for Central and Eastern Europe, exposing the region’s vulnerabilities in defence readiness and industrial resilience. Frontline countries bear disproportionate pressure in terms of land warfare requirements, intensified munitions depletion, and strategic incentives to expand force structure in anticipation of enduring insecurity (Hellberg and Lundmark, 2025). Industrial capabilities across the region exhibit significant disparities, constraining the potential for self-reliant manufacturing and replenishment. Domestic production, where available, is commonly constrained by limited access to critical inputs and insufficient elasticity for rapid output expansion. When acquisition occurs abroad, it tends to entrench enduring support dependencies on external vendors. Regions experiencing the highest threat intensity often lack autonomous defence-industrial capacity, with production hubs situated elsewhere and further undermined by systemic disunity. A wider implication is the evident discrepancy between Europe’s rapid operational adjustments and its comparatively lagging industrial transformation. This should not be interpreted as a failure of policy, but as a clarification of the structural limitations shaping the trajectory of strategic autonomy. The reconfiguration of defence-industrial capacity necessitates sustained temporal continuity, financial commitment, and institutional alignment, all of which are complicated by national sovereignty considerations in a fragmented political landscape. The Ukrainian case highlights both exogenous reliance on transatlantic partners and endogenous vulnerability stemming from concentrated production capacities, scarce chemical inputs, and limited cross-border supplier integration. As a proving ground for defence industrial readiness, Ukraine makes clear that strategic autonomy cannot be meaningfully evaluated through policy declarations or increased spending alone. Strategic autonomy must be judged by the extent to which defence production can be scaled, sustained under protracted strain, and integrated across fragmented governance and supply structures. The conflict underscores the tangible foundations required for European strategic autonomy to transition from rhetoric to reality.

Implications for European security and military cooperation

Conceptualizing strategic autonomy as a material and political-economic problem reorients scholarly debates on European security cooperation. Rather than questions of rhetorical alignment or institutional ambition, the central problem concerns the management of scale, functional specialization, and interdependence across a disaggregated defence-industrial base. Absent supply-chain-level procurement integration, European security cooperation remains constrained by a ceiling on effective coordination. Common threat assessments and joint declarations are inadequate if procurement remains nationally partitioned and technical standards are not harmonized. Initiatives such as EDIRPA, ASAP, and the European Defence Industrial Strategy reflect an emerging awareness of this problem, but their effectiveness ultimately depends on their capacity to institutionalize demand aggregation, streamline cross-border contracting, and address upstream constraints in key inputs (European Union, 2023a). The structural standing of Central and Eastern Europe suggests that strategic autonomy cannot be operationalized as an overwhelmingly West European production scheme with CEE positioned primarily as a market for consumption. Where the eastern flank functions as the principal focal point of deterrence imperatives, particularly in ground warfare, the supporting industrial configuration must be able to deliver rapidly and at scale to CEE. Where urgent requirements push CEE states toward external suppliers, the European internal market persists in a fragmented condition, with scale efficiencies remaining unattained. By contrast, where CEE functions as a meaningful site of production, the problem shifts toward incorporating regional capacities into European value chains while avoiding renewed forms of peripheralization, including assembly without design control or production lacking upstream components.

Asymmetric reliance and structural disintegration are more accurately conceived as multi-layered dynamics than as binary outcomes. Europe may alleviate dependency risks in selected industrial layers, such as by increasing munitions assembly capacity, while sustaining structural reliance in upstream inputs, including energetics, and in sophisticated subsystems such as sensors and software-defined architectures. The decisive criterion for strategic autonomy lies not in claims of European-made identity, but in the ability to secure uninterrupted supply under disruptive circumstances. Under this framework, autonomy assumes the character of industrial robustness, namely, the capability to preserve preparedness when inputs, subcomponents, or foreign suppliers become inaccessible or delayed (Lippert et al., 2019). This suggests that European security cooperation will remain institutionally bounded unless defence-industrial integration overcomes constraints related to production scale, technical harmonization, and resilience in upstream supply chains. In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, this limitation is particularly pronounced, as deterrence demands are urgent and ground-force intensive, industrial depth is asymmetrically distributed, and procurement urgency drives reliance on non-European suppliers. The point is not to advance a prescriptive critique of procurement behavior, but to articulate an analytical claim regarding how these choices intersect with structural disaggregation to circumscribe European strategic autonomy as a material capability.

Conclusion

This study contends that European strategic autonomy is limited less by a deficit of political will than by structural vulnerabilities within defence supply chains and asymmetries in industrial capacity across Europe. Adopting a political-economy approach, the analysis redefines strategic autonomy not as symbolic intent or discrete operational readiness, but as an industrial-material capability anchored in production volume, supply-chain coherence, and long-duration military sustainability. At the heart of the analysis is the claim that fragmented procurement architectures, limited cross-border coordination, and chokepoints in upstream inputs curtail Europe’s capacity to translate expanded defence budgets into resilient and self-sustaining capabilities. The conflict in Ukraine has acted as a structural stress test for the underlying defence-industrial framework. Despite swift operational adaptation by European states, industrial transformation proceeded more slowly than frontline consumption required. Shell shortages, protracted output timelines, and reliance on restricted upstream components laid bare the weaknesses of supply chains engineered for lean peacetime performance instead of high-intensity attritional conflict. Prioritizing 155 mm artillery ammunition over technologically complex systems demonstrates a broader lesson: strategic autonomy in high-intensity warfare depends more on industrial throughput and replenishment resilience than on access to frontier technologies. Under this interpretation, Ukraine has demonstrated that Europe’s defence-industrial ecosystem is characterized by structural constraints, rather than merely short-lived coordination inefficiencies. Central and Eastern Europe constitutes a key node within this broader architecture. As the region most directly exposed to security threats, CEE creates the strongest demand impulse for land-based military capacity and long-term readiness. However, regional industrial capability remains heterogeneous, and procurement time constraints have repeatedly incentivized rapid extra-European acquisition. Consequently, a structural imbalance emerges in which the eastern flank bears the most significant deterrence obligations but continues to depend in part on non-European supply and support chains. Should strategic autonomy be more than rhetorical, it must prove reliable at the point of immediate deterrence exposure. The case of CEE operates less as an outlying example than as a critical testing ground where the material limits of autonomy are rendered visible.

This analysis yields three broader conceptual implications. First, strategic autonomy should be measured by the robustness of supply security in periods of stress rather than by discursive commitments or headline budget figures. Second, systemic fragmentation and uneven dependence operate in stratified form along the production chain; strengthening final assembly capacity does not dissolve reliance on upstream materials or complex subsystems. Third, military-industrial cooperation across Europe is not simply a function of political alignment, but rather a structural coordination issue involving scale consolidation, regulatory harmonization, and long-term demand coordination. This analysis emphasizes conceptual precision and structural assessment instead of normative policy guidance. Further inquiry should analyze how collective demand aggregation interacts with concentration across production layers, how upstream chokepoints in energetics and strategic inputs condition rearmament dynamics, and how procurement patterns in Central and Eastern Europe shape long-term maintenance dependencies and alliance configurations. In wider analytical terms, strategic autonomy should be conceptualized as a defence-industrial political economy: a coordination problem centered on production scale, division of labor, and durability within a diverse Europe confronting enduring security stress. By locating strategic autonomy within the structural conditions of defence-industrial organization, the analysis contributes to current debates across European security and global political economy. The analysis indicates that the decisive matter lies less in Europe’s declared ambition for autonomy than in its capacity to sustain it industrially.