Joint procurement was a pipe dream five years ago. Now it is becoming policy.
In June 2025, something remarkable happened in European defence. Germany, France, Poland, and Italy jointly ordered 800 armoured vehicles from a consortium of European manufacturers. The deal, worth €12 billion, was the largest joint procurement in EU history. It was also the first real test of the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) adopted in March 2024.
For decades, European defence procurement has been a patchwork of national preferences and duplicated systems. NATO allies operate 178 different weapon systems where the United States operates 30. The result is higher costs, lower interoperability, and a defence industrial base that cannot compete with American or Chinese scale.
Previous attempts at European defence cooperation failed because there was no urgency. The 2017 Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) launched 60 projects; most produced studies, not systems. The European Defence Fund funded research but not production.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed the equation. Suddenly, European armies needed ammunition, not white papers. The scramble to supply Ukraine exposed how fragmented European production capacity was. Shells that should have taken weeks to deliver took months. Some allies discovered their stockpiles would last three days in a high-intensity conflict.