Bigger defence budgets are not enough to secure Europe

[LONDON] After years of underinvestment, Europe is finally beginning to increase defence spending. Few have put the stakes more bluntly than former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) secretary-general George Robertson, who warned that decades of “corrosive complacency” have left the UK “in peril”.

According to the European Defence Agency, the EU’s spending on defence-related R&D totalled just 13 billion euros (S$19.4 billion) in 2024 – about 0.07 per cent of gross domestic product – compared with US$149 billion, or roughly 0.5 per cent of GDP, in the US.

Closing this gap will require not only more public R&D spending, but a fundamentally different approach to capital mobilisation.