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Defence Spending in Europe: Can We Do Better Without Spending More?

Fabio Liberti, Inst. for Int'l and Strategic Relations (IRIS) | September 2011

"The situation of defence capacities in Europe is pretty dire," concludes Fabio Liberti in his report for the French think tank Notre Europe. "The budgetary crisis that is afflicting member states of the Union is likely to mean more cuts in national defence budgets. The issue of improving the efficiency of spending in defence is therefore one that is being raised with a certain amount of urgency."

Mr. Liberti outlines four ways that could facilitate a better use of European national defense budgets:  

• Remove obstacles to achieve a more open European defense market, which would lead to more competition between defense companies therefore more efficiency in spending.


• 'Europeanize' parts of national defense budgets within the framework of the EU in order to take advantage of economies of scale and to avoid redundancies and duplication, which generate a lack of efficiency.


• ‘Communitarize' funding for military missions to better take account of positive externalities that these actions generate for countries who do not have the military capacities to carry them out.


• ‘Pool and share' military capacities by putting in place a policy along these lines at the European level for current capacities via the launch of new cooperation programmes on a European scale.

The full report Defence spending in Europe: Can we do better without spending more? by Fabio Liberti, Director of Research at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) is available for download as a PDF.