NATO’s digital arsenal: How Europe can avoid a new dependence on America

European Council on Foreign Relations  |  Arthur de Liedekerke

European member states of NATO face a critical strategic vulnerability due to their overwhelming reliance on United States commercial technology giants for digital defense infrastructure. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern warfare relies heavily on cloud computing, satellite communications, and artificial intelligence, which are currently dominated by American firms like Microsoft and SpaceX.

This asymmetric dependence threatens European strategic autonomy and leaves the continent highly vulnerable to shifts in Washington's political priorities or unilateral corporate decisions. To mitigate these risks, European nations are seeking to collaboratively invest in sovereign defense-tech capabilities, establish unified procurement standards, and leverage joint initiatives like the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. Fostering a robust domestic defense-technology industrial base will allow European allies to contribute more equitably to NATO’s collective digital defense, secure critical supply chains, and safeguard their long-term technological sovereignty against external disruptions.

Comment

The European Defence Fund allocation of nearly eight billion euros for the 2021–2027 cycle reflects an institutional attempt to pivot from legacy kinetic platforms toward software-defined capabilities. However, the fragmentation of national procurement cycles across EU member states prevents the rapid scaling of dual-use technologies developed under the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. This systemic bottleneck leaves European militaries dependent on proprietary American systems like SpaceX's Starlink and Microsoft's Azure for operational-level data processing. Consequently, the European defense industrial base remains unable to transition from heavy hardware production to sovereign, high-availability digital infrastructure.

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