Europe's Defence Autonomy Within Reach: The Sparta 2.0 Roadmap and the Shifting Transatlantic Calculus

In May 2026, the debate over European strategic autonomy in defence has reached a defining inflection point. A landmark paper published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, authored by five of Germany's most prominent defence investors, industrial leaders, and security analysts, has concluded that European sovereignty in defence and security is not merely aspirational but fiscally and technologically achievable within a decade. The paper — informally dubbed "Sparta 2.0" — identifies ten critical capability gaps that have left Europe dependent on the United States across the entire military-effect chain, from satellite-based reconnaissance to battlefield fire control and deep precision strike. The price tag for closing these gaps: an estimated €500 billion over ten years, or roughly €50 billion annually, representing approximately 0.25 percent of European GDP and just 10 percent of total projected European defence spending.

The five signatories to the paper carry considerable weight in both German and European defence circles. They include Thomas Enders, former CEO of Airbus and current president of the German Council on Foreign Relations; Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, president of venture-capital firm General Catalyst; economist Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute; René Obermann, chairman of Airbus and former Deutsche Telekom CEO; and security analyst Nico Lange, a former defence ministry staffer. Their joint intervention amounts to one of the most detailed and authoritative blueprints for European defence autonomy produced since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shattered the continent's post-Cold War security assumptions.

The paper's core finding is both sobering and cautiously optimistic. Current European defence spending increases, while significant, provide only "modest" gains in operational independence from the United States. Europe remains critically dependent on American enablers — from Starlink-class satellite communications and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), to the command-and-control platforms that integrate battlefield data into actionable targeting cycles. Ukraine's war has demonstrated in real time that modern high-intensity conflict consumes these enablers at staggering rates, and that reliance on a single external provider — however reliable — constitutes an unacceptable strategic vulnerability. "A high degree of European independence can be achieved within a few years, at a cost that can be financed through the planned budget increases," Enders stated upon the paper's release on 7 May. "Ukraine shows us that this does not take decades."

Among the ten capability gaps identified, several merit particular attention for their strategic urgency. The first is command and control (C2): Europe lacks a sovereign equivalent to American defence-technology platforms, and the paper calls for building a European C2 and battle-management system within three to four years, using Ukraine's battlefield-tested Delta system as a reference architecture, at an estimated cost of €10 billion to over €20 billion. The second is scaled autonomous systems, where Europe has largely missed Ukraine's paradigm shift towards drone-dominated warfare. The authors propose mass-production capacity for several million drones and loitering munitions per year, plus a major unmanned ground vehicle programme leveraging the German automotive industry and AI startups, at a cost of €30 billion or more over three to five years.

Ground-based deep precision strike represents a third critical gap, with a recommended investment of €20 billion to €30 billion to field credible European long-range fires within three to five years. Air defence — particularly affordable, large-scale counter-drone systems at the brigade level and ballistic missile defence — is estimated at €50 billion for initial operating capability within three to five years and full build-out within a decade. Perhaps most ambitiously, the paper calls for a European equivalent to Starlink as the number one priority in satellite communications and positioning, navigation, and timing, alongside sustained investment in sixth-generation air combat systems that will require at least €200 billion and ten or more years of development across two parallel programmes.

Implementation, the authors argue, should proceed through lead-nation coalitions rather than a "new European super-structure" — a pragmatic acknowledgement of the EU's cumbersome institutional machinery. Equally important is a procurement paradigm shift: moving from hundreds of pages of specifications to prototype competitions, rewarding outcomes rather than inputs, and lowering barriers to new entrants. "Ukraine shows that a broad supplier landscape combining established and new actors is more resilient, faster and more cost-effective than relying on a few large prime contractors," the paper observes — a pointed critique of Europe's traditional defence-industrial oligopoly.

The Sparta 2.0 analysis lands at a moment of unusual momentum in European defence politics. NATO's Exercise STEADFAST DETERRENCE 2026, the Alliance's premier strategic and operational-level collective defence exercise, is currently underway across multiple locations in Europe and the United States, with its headquarters in Stavanger, Norway. The exercise is designed to test NATO's ability to deter and, if necessary, defend against peer-level aggression across all domains. Its timing — conducted amid the most volatile European security environment since the height of the Cold War — underscores the operational urgency behind the capability gaps the Sparta paper identifies.

Simultaneously, the European Union's Readiness 2030 initiative, formally launched as part of the Commission's defence roadmap agreed in October 2025, has begun translating political ambition into budgetary reality. The roadmap prescribes a fast-track work programme starting in March 2026, aiming to equip the Union with an industrial defence capacity capable of meeting both current and future challenges across air, land, sea, cyber, and space domains. The Commission's 2026 Work Programme has placed security and defence at its centre, signalling an institutional commitment that would have been unthinkable even five years ago. The activation of the national escape clause — exempting defence spending from EU fiscal rules — has further lubricated the political machinery, helping member states converge around the 5 percent of GDP defence spending pledge agreed at the 2025 NATO Summit.

Yet the picture is not uniformly rosy. GLOBSEC's 2026 Eastern Flank Readiness report, assessing battle readiness across ten NATO frontline states from Estonia to Bulgaria, finds that while progress is real, it remains dangerously uneven. Critical gaps persist in mobilisation speed, logistics infrastructure, and defence-industrial capacity — precisely the areas where Russia has demonstrated both its own vulnerabilities and its ability to sustain a grinding war of attrition. The report warns that without urgent remediation, the Eastern Flank states could face crippling shortfalls in a crisis despite headline increases in defence budgets.

The transatlantic dimension adds further complexity. The UK-EU Security and Defence Partnership, signed on 19 May 2025, established the most comprehensive framework for UK-EU defence coordination since Brexit, encompassing joint support for Ukraine — where Operation Interflex and the EU Military Assistance Mission have collectively trained more than 120,000 Ukrainian troops — maritime security cooperation including countering the sanctions-evading "shadow fleet" of oil tankers, cyber threat coordination, and regular ministerial-level dialogues. Yet the partnership's first anniversary has been marked by the collapse of talks for UK participation in the EU's SAFE defence fund — a stark reminder that post-Brexit institutional friction persists alongside strategic convergence. The European Parliament's own brief on UK-EU defence cooperation, published in 2026, notes that "deep industrial interdependence coexists with caps on third-country participation, which limit UK access to EU programmes, and unresolved questions of sovereignty and financial contribution."

The cumulative picture that emerges in May 2026 is of a Europe that has absorbed the strategic shock of the Ukraine war and is now engaged in the harder, slower work of translating political declarations into deployable military capability. The Sparta 2.0 authors frame this as Europe's "Manhattan Project" — a deliberate, well-resourced, and politically prioritised effort to achieve technological superiority and credible deterrence. The financial arithmetic is encouraging: €50 billion a year is a fraction of what Europe already spends on defence, and a rounding error relative to the economic cost of failing to deter. The industrial and technological base exists. The political will, after decades of fragmentation and underinvestment, is being forged in the crucible of war on the continent's eastern periphery.

Whether that will proves durable enough to sustain a ten-year investment programme across multiple electoral cycles remains the defining question. The Sparta 2.0 paper offers not just a roadmap but a test: if Europe cannot summon the collective purpose to spend 0.25 percent of its GDP on sovereign defence capabilities at a time when a major land war burns on its borders, it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which it ever will. The authors are convinced that Europe's security "will be decided by technological superiority and by the willingness to invest massively where it counts." The next decade will reveal whether that conviction is shared by the political classes of 27 democracies, or whether the moment of strategic clarity passes as so many others have before it.