Europe can achieve defense and security autonomy with an additional investment of €50 billion per year during the coming decade. That is the main conclusion of the Sparta 2.0 report, prepared by five heavyweight German figures — including former Airbus CEO Thomas Enders and the president of the Kiel Institute, Moritz Schularick — and published by the prestigious think tank. The document identifies ten critical strategic gaps, from command and control to deep strike, and argues that closing them is “achievable” with political will and without the need to create a European super-structure.
Why €50 billion and ten concrete gaps?
The role of the German experts is not a soliloquy: it quantifies the cost of breaking dependence on the United States across the entire chain of military effects, from satellite reconnaissance to fire control on the battlefield. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates the effort at about €150-200 billion by 2030 and around €500 billion in a decade. The round figure — €50 billion per year — represents only about 10% of Europe’s total defense spending and 0.25% of the EU’s GDP.
The five signatories — Enders, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg (General Catalyst), Schularick, René Obermann (chairman of Airbus) and analyst Nico Lange — note that current plans to increase spending offer only “modest” gains in real independence. To go further, they propose a decalog of gaps:
- Command and control: Europe lacks an equivalent to Palantir and needs a sovereign C2 and battlefield management system; estimated cost of 10 to more than 20 billion euros and three to four years of development.
- Scaled autonomous systems: Ukraine has shown that drone warfare is the new paradigm. Between €30 billion and €40 billion would be needed to manufacture millions of drones and loitering munitions per year, in addition to unmanned ground vehicles with the German automotive industry.
- Deep ground-attack precision: a capability that would require between €20 billion and €30 billion within a three-to-five-year timeframe.
- Sixth-generation air systems: at least a decade and €200 billion for two parallel programs.
- Air and missile defense: filling the gap in drone defense at brigade level and ballistic missiles would cost €50 billion.
- Satellite reconnaissance, communications and PNT: top priority: build a European Starlink.
- Space launch, persistent aerial ISR, military cloud, AI, strategic airlift and electronic warfare.
That said, the estimates are subject to 20-30% deviations, acknowledge the authors, who advocate coalitions of leading countries in each area rather than a “European super-structure.” They also propose a shift in mindset in procurement: prototype competitions, contracts that reward results, a focus on productive capacity and low barriers to entry for new players.
If Europe understands its defense challenge as its ‘Manhattan Project,’ it can reach autonomous operating capability in a period of three to five years, the authors conclude.
The opportunity for Spain: what role in the new ‘Manhattan Project’?
For Spain, the equation is as uncomfortable as it is full of opportunities. The €50 billion per year would have to be financed collectively. Our country, with defense spending still around 1.28% of GDP in 2025, would see NATO and Brussels’ pressure translate into an additional bill of several billions per year. But it could also leverage the impulse to consolidate an industrial leap: Navantia, Indra or ITP Aero already participate in programs such as FCAS, and the push for drones and autonomous systems opens a niche where Spanish tech SMEs can compete. The key will be whether Moncloa and the Ministry of Defense manage to ensure that the leadership of one of those coalitions falls to a Spanish company or center, rather than merely being a secondary partner.
Moreover, the bases of Rota and Morón, which host key U.S. assets, lend themselves to an ambivalent reading: they are a security guarantee but also a strategic anchor that limits the autonomy the report preaches. In a Europe that wants to walk alone, the value of those facilities is redefined: they could be the bridge for interoperability or a ballast if Washington decides to pull back toward the Indo-Pacific. The proximity of the southern flank — Morocco, Algeria and the Sahel — adds pressure: Spain needs ISR capabilities and drones to watch over its exclusive economic zones, a point the document does not detail but that fits like a glove the logic of the gaps identified.
Balance of Power
The publication of the Sparta 2.0 report is not an academic exercise: it arrives at a moment when the Trump administration is demanding European allies spend defense at 5% of GDP, and while the Kremlin continues to burn material in Ukraine at a pace that exhausts Western arsenals. The message from the German experts is summarized in a single sentence: “European defense sovereignty is financially achievable and technically viable in less than a decade.” And that constitutes a bold move in front of those in Washington who believe Europe will always foot the bill.
For Moscow, the prospect of an autonomous European pillar means a different calculation: if Brussels achieves credible area-denial capability without relying on the American umbrella, the Russian doctrine of horizontal escalation — threatening the Baltic states to weaken the whole — loses efficacy. For The United States, the dilemma is evident: a strong European ally can free up resources to contain China, but it also reduces Washington’s influence over the fate of European security. The current administration seems willing to bear that risk, provided the price — the 5% — is paid on time.
In this chessboard, Spain occupies a singular position. Its energy dependence on North Africa and the growth of migratory tensions make it the only European partner with a southern flank exposed to several fragile states and armed non-state actors. European autonomy, if it does not include a robust southern dimension, would leave the Iberian Peninsula as a supporting actor in a project designed almost exclusively for the East. The strategic reading in Moncloa is that Spain must carve out a place in naval drone programs and autonomous maritime surveillance systems, taking advantage of NATO’s recent renewal of its southern flank concept at the Madrid summit in 2025. Not doing so would be to accept that €50 billion per year are spent defending a Europe that begins in the Carpathians and ends in the Baltic.
The big question five years from now is whether political will really exists. The track record of European defense over the last twenty years is not encouraging: stalled projects, industrial duplications and a Franco-German core that often excludes mid-sized actors. But the war in Ukraine has shifted incentives. If European leaders read Sparta 2.0 as the script they needed to justify to their parliaments a new budgetary effort, the path toward an autonomous European pillar will take a qualitative leap at the upcoming informal EU defense summit scheduled for September in Brussels. The question is no longer whether Europe can pay for it, but whether it wants to.
