Five percent for Defence:  What Europe Needs to Rapidly Become Defence-Ready

At the NATO summit in Washington, member states committed to raising defense spending targets to five percent of GDP — a historic shift in security policy. The challenge now lies in converting funding into deployable, interoperable capabilities at speed. This will require Europe’s defense industry to overcome entrenched bottlenecks in supply chains, certification, and system integration, while embedding technical interoperability into every procurement from day one.

At the NATO summit in Washington, member states agreed to raise their defence spending targets to five percent of GDP. This commitment marks a new era in defence policy. The core question is how to translate political will into operational capability. The European defence industry must address persistent bottlenecks in supply chains, system interoperability, and certification processes.

From Funding Commitments to Operational Capability

Delivering on the five percent target will depend not only on procurement volume, but on the industrial system’s ability to deliver certified, deployable and interoperable capabilities at speed. Today, however, defence programs across Europe remain constrained by fragmented engineering practices. Development often relies on static documents, isolated tools and non-standardized data formats. Specifications are passed sequentially between stakeholders. System behavior is described in prose rather than executable logic. Testing begins only after physical prototypes are built. As a result, integration efforts frequently fail late in the process, delaying certification and deployment.

This legacy approach also limits scalability. Every system variant, interface change or configuration update introduces uncertainty, because dependencies are poorly documented and engineering data lacks lifecycle traceability. Manual coordination between subsystems consumes valuable time. When multiple nations collaborate on a platform, these inefficiencies multiply.

To address this, defence programs must move toward fully integrated, model-based development environments. In such environments, system requirements, functions, and interfaces are captured in structured, machine-readable models. These models are accessible across all engineering disciplines and reflect the full operational context of the system. This allows for earlier validation, faster iteration and more predictable certification. Digital continuity must extend across the full lifecycle. All technical data – from architecture models to test results – must remain connected, versioned and auditable. This enables change impact assessments, preserves configuration integrity and supports certification under evolving regulatory frameworks.

But integration does not stop at the system level. For Europe to become defence-ready in a multinational environment, these principles must extend to cross-border collaboration. That requires technical interoperability as a strategic foundation of every development effort.

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Interoperability as a Strategic Requirement

To turn increased defence budgets into actual readiness, Europe must ensure that military systems from different nations are interoperable by default. This affects multiple layers of system architecture. At the communication level, radio systems and encrypted networks must use compatible frequency ranges, protocols, and key management schemes. At the software level, mission systems must exchange tactical data in real time using standardized message formats and synchronized timing. And at the mechanical level, launchers, sensors and transport interfaces must follow common geometries, connector types and power specifications.

Achieving this requires harmonized engineering models. Every participating supplier must describe system behavior, data interfaces and physical integration points in a structured, machine-readable format. These models must be validated not in isolation, but in system-of-systems simulations that reflect joint operational scenarios. For example, an unmanned aerial vehicle developed in one country must be able to relay target data to fire control systems developed elsewhere without middleware or custom adaptations. Beyond technical compatibility, lifecycle traceability is essential. System variants deployed in different countries must remain aligned with a shared baseline. When updates occur, each change must be documented in a version-controlled environment that preserves interface contracts. Otherwise, long-term interoperability collapses as platforms diverge through uncontrolled local adaptations.

To enable this, joint development programs must establish cross-national configuration governance, that includes a common model repository, shared verification criteria and centralized change review boards. Without this discipline, even standardized systems become fragmented over time. Europe will only become defence-ready at scale if technical interoperability is engineered into every procurement from day one. 

Strategic Supply Chains

Why Europe's Defence Depends on Civilian Industry

Scalable Defence without Prime Contractors Alone

Achieving interoperability across national defence systems is not solely the task of large defence integrators. Small and medium-sized enterprises deliver many of the subsystems that enable mobility, sensing, computing, and energy supply. These include avionics modules, embedded control units, optical payloads and cryptographic components. However, most SMEs do not maintain the kind of in-house infrastructure required for NATO-compatible integration, configuration tracking or STANAG-based verification procedures.

To remain part of multinational procurement programs, these suppliers must be able to generate digitally traceable design data, manage interface specifications and deliver compliance artifacts that meet the formal requirements of certification authorities. This includes defining software behavior in standardized modeling languages, exporting interface control documents in interoperable formats and tagging physical parts with structured metadata for integration into configuration baselines.

One practical step is the adoption of system modeling tools that support modular architectures and allow SMEs to represent their subsystems within a larger system context. This enables early validation of interface behavior, data exchange logic and electrical or mechanical compatibility. SMEs can use these models to participate in joint simulation environments and submit artifacts for pre-certification review before physical integration begins. Additionally, SMEs must establish version-controlled repositories for their technical documentation, including CAD files, schematics, software binaries and test reports. These repositories must be structured in a way that allows primes and government bodies to trace component revisions, verify configuration consistency and assess compliance status without requiring manual intervention. Alignment with NATO’s interoperability profile means mapping all subsystems to reference architectures, following standardized interface naming conventions and tagging deliverables with STANAG classification attributes.

For this to succeed at scale, national support programs must not only fund innovation but also provide access to engineering infrastructure that enables SMEs to meet military-level digital governance. Defence readiness in a distributed industrial base requires that even the smallest contributors operate with the same level of system discipline as the primes. (mbf)

Marc Rivière is Global Industry Advisor Aerospace & Defense at PTC. With over 20 years of experience in the French Air and Space Force, including as Program Lead for the A400M and a former professor at the US Air Force Academy, he now advises global defense organizations on building scalable, secure, and interoperable digital strategies.