Defence industry

This Brief looks at the EU’s Capability Development Plan (CDP) and argues that it might be seen as the glue that can enhance coherence between other defence initiatives. What defence capabilities could the EU collectively prioritise now and in the future in a context of finite...

This Report turns the spotlight on two major players in the global defence industry: Russia and China. It examines how both countries, however different in their trajectory and ambition, have in recent years narrowed the industrial and technological gap with the European...

Permanent Structured Cooperation, the so-called ‘sleeping beauty’ of EU defence, is awake. This Chaillot Paper looks at the historical evolution of PeSCo and its potential ramifications for EU operations and capability development.

New technologies are changing the face of warfare. Now, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, can these emerging technologies reverse the trend of the ever-growing logistics tail of modern armed forces?

This Chaillot Paper analyses how Arab states strive to achieve strategic, economic and symbolic goals through indigenous armaments production, with some countries in the region showing a new determination to become more self-reliant in this domain. The paper focuses in particular...

Over the past decades, defence cooperation has helped European countries preserve their security. Defence cooperation in the second machine age may, however, need to evolve and move beyond traditional joint procurement programmes to pertain also to new domains.

This Alert looks at the coordinated annual review on defence (‘CARD’) announced at the end of 2016. How could CARD change the way defence cooperation operates in Europe?

Through carefully targeted financial incentives the European Commission hopes that the European Defence Fund can help change the rules of the game for European defence cooperation. But how might the Commission structure or modulate it?

2015 saw Russia, Saudi Arabia and China invest heavily in their militaries, while Europeans have largely reversed long-standing defence budget cuts, too. Increases in defence spending have, however, had very different implications for the military activities of the respective...

In response to the worsening security environment, cuts to European defence budgets are finally being reversed. In this Brief, defence spending data from 2015 are spliced by region and by category to show how the calculus is changing in defence ministries across Europe.