European debates about “strategic autonomy” have often been framed as questions of political will and defense spending. Over the past year, the discussion has tightened around a more operational issue: whether Europe can coordinate military action if the United States is preoccupied elsewhere, or unwilling to lead. A key driver is the growing perception—across policy and public discourse—that U.S. attention is increasingly contested between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific, and that European security may no longer be Washington’s default priority.
The implication is straightforward: Europe’s binding constraint is not the existence of platforms. It is the engineering reality of integrated surveillance, command-and-control (C2), and decision cycles that can function under European political authority.
One useful way to read the current policy literature is that “U.S. reliability” is being treated as a variable rather than a constant. A 2025 policy paper from the Jacques Delors Institute summarizes the underlying logic with unusual bluntness, pointing to growing uncertainty over the reliability of American protection.
Whatever one’s view of alliance politics, that sentence encodes a planning requirement: European concepts of operations must assume that U.S. enablers—ISR fusion, long-range lift, targeting architectures, protected communications—may be delayed, constrained, or politically unavailable.
In practice, Europe’s capacity to act without U.S. leadership depends on whether it can generate and exploit a Common Operational Picture (COP) at operational tempo. That is an integration problem across:
heterogeneous national sensors (air surveillance radars, coastal/maritime sensors, EW receivers, space-derived products),
track correlation and identity management,
data governance and platform policies (what is shared, at what classification, with whom, and under which release rules),
and a headquarters element that can run collection management and dissemination continuously.
The European Parliament’s Research Service describes the “cost of non-Europe” in defense cooperation (meaning the the economic and operational loss caused by fragmented national defense planning and procurement) in explicitly economic terms, estimating inefficiencies in the range of “€18 to €57 billion per year.” But the operational analogue is just as significant: fragmentation translates into latency, incomplete track pictures, and brittle cross-border workflows.
Any European “act without the U.S.” concept runs into the headquarters problem: who owns the operational picture, and who has tasking authority? The EU’s Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC) is the obvious nucleus, but the academic literature is clear-eyed about its constraints.
Reykers and Adriaensen write that “The MPCC has since then been hindered by systematic understaffing,” and add that “A limited pool of resources stretched thinly across rivalling institutions is a central problem.”
From a technical standpoint, understaffing is not an abstract governance issue. It determines whether an organisation can run: (1) a 24/7 ISR fusion cell, (2) collection management, (3) a track-quality regime (confidence measures, bias management, identity workflows), and (4) a dissemination pipeline into deployed force headquarters and national nodes.
PESCO stands for Permanent Structured Cooperation and refers to a European Union framework that allows participating member states to cooperate more closely on defence capability development, investment, and operational readiness, with the aim of reducing fragmentation and improving interoperability within European defence.
EDF stands for European Defence Fund and is a European Union funding programme designed to support collaborative defence research and capability development across member states, with a particular focus on strengthening Europe’s industrial and technological defence base and improving interoperability.
MPCC stands for Military Planning and Conduct Capability and is the European Union’s permanent military headquarters responsible for the planning and conduct of EU military missions, providing operational command and control under EU political authority.
How should they play together as parts of one architecture?
Industrial policy and capability planning matter, but only insofar as they produce an interoperable operational system. A recent peer-reviewed article by Daniel Fiott (2024) charts a move “from market liberalisation to industrial policy” in EU defense initiatives. The operational significance is that Europe is now explicitly trying to build the industrial and technological base for sustained readiness—not only buy-end platforms.
The practical way to translate this into capability is to interpret EU instruments as parts of one architecture:
PESCO as the capability catalogue (surveillance-relevant projects and deployable CIS/C2 building blocks);
EDF / EDIP-era funding logic as the mechanism to finance the enabling layer (secure networking, operational clouds, cross-domain solutions, interoperability tooling);
MPCC as the operational “customer” that turns data flows into decisions and tasking.
This is also consistent with the “spend more, spend better, spend European” framing highlighted in the EPRS report.
A workable European approach does not require a single central sensor system. It requires a federated surveillance fabric:
Federated track layer
National sensors remain sovereign; Europe shares track objects, metadata, and confidence measures into a common track store (with policy-driven filtering).
Interoperability and guards by design
Attribute-based access control, releasability tags, and cross-domain guards are treated as core system components, not add-ons.
MPCC-operated fusion and tasking
The MPCC runs a permanent fusion cell, publishes the operational COP, and issues collection requests via standing agreements under EU political mandates.
Degraded-mode operation as a requirement
Radar/EW training should assume datalink denial, spoofed timing, partial sensor dropout, and contradictory reporting—then train operators and staff to manage track quality and decision-making under uncertainty.
Taken together, this federated approach also has important industrial and innovation implications. By defining participation at the level of interfaces, data products, and performance envelopes rather than ownership of entire systems, it allows both start-ups and established defense primes to contribute according to their specific capabilities. Smaller actors can provide niche sensors, algorithms, analytics, or training tools, while larger players integrate platforms, networks, and sustainment. The result is a scalable, architecture deeply integrated into AI, in which capability can be added incrementally, competition remains possible at subsystem level, and emergent operational effects arise from the interaction of independently developed components rather than from a single, monolithic design (read more on military platform innovation).
The recent turn in European debate is less about slogans than about systems. If U.S. focus continues to be contested between theatres, Europe’s operational credibility will hinge on whether it can fuse surveillance, run C2, and generate decisions at speed—under European authority. The most concrete path runs through MPCC capacity, PESCO capability lanes, and EDF/EDIP-enabled infrastructure.
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