When Mario Draghi presented his report on European competitiveness in Strasbourg on 17 September 2024, he was blunt about defence: "In the defence sector, common planning comes before common expenditure." Spend together, or waste the money. Two years on, Europe is spending like never before. Whether it is planning is another question.
EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index — the think tank's running tally of how many of the report's 383 recommendations have become binding EU action — makes defence the standout. In its January 2026 interim audit, defence implementation leapt from 35.7% to 78.6%, by far the biggest jump of any policy area. Nothing else in the Draghi agenda has moved so fast.
That pace is the exception, not the rule. Across all 383 recommendations, the index found just 15.7% fully implemented and 41.3% implemented in full or in part by its July 2026 update. And the momentum is fading: the index added only 2.4 points between February and June 2026, a third of the pace of the previous six months. Defence is the one place where Brussels and national capitals have consistently found the political will to act.
The spending numbers explain why. The European Defence Agency reported in July 2026 that the EU's 27 member states spent €418 billion on defence in 2025 — a 20% jump on the year before — and projected €454 billion for 2026. At last year's NATO summit in The Hague, allies committed to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, with national roadmaps due this year. After decades of shrinking armies, Europe has rediscovered the defence budget.
Draghi's point was that money alone does not buy capability. Twenty-seven countries buying twenty-seven different tanks, radios and missiles pay more and get less. His report called for common planning first: agree what Europe needs, then buy it together to win scale, lower prices and equipment that actually works across borders.
Here the picture is thinner. The EU's flagship new instrument, SAFE — Security Action for Europe — was adopted in May 2025 and offers €150 billion in loans, but only for joint purchases involving at least two countries. The European Defence Industry Programme adds a further €1.5 billion for 2026–2027 to seed common procurement of counter-drone, air-defence and naval systems. These are real, and they point the right way. But set against €454 billion in mostly national spending, they are a rounding error. The bulk of Europe's defence money still flows through national budgets to national suppliers.
This is why a 78.6% implementation score deserves a second look. Much of what the index counts as done on defence is the kind of recommendation that is easiest to tick off: creating a funding programme, launching an instrument, passing an enabling regulation. The harder ask — getting sovereign governments to plan and buy together, ceding a slice of control over their own armies — is the one that moves slowest everywhere in the Draghi agenda, defence included.
Europe has answered the easy half of Draghi's challenge. The taboo on defence spending is gone, and the numbers prove it. But the report's real warning was about fragmentation, not frugality — and on that front the €454 billion Europe will spend this year is mostly still being spent the old way, country by country. The risk Draghi flagged is that a spending surge without common planning simply buys a more expensive version of the same fragmented forces Europe already has. The index says defence is winning. The fine print says the hardest work has barely started.
