GLOBSEC

12/06/2026

Drones, missiles, and attacks that come faster than decisions can be made. The war in Ukraine has shown that some of Europe's air defence assumptions simply did not survive contact with reality.

On the margins of the Forum, we hosted a closed-door roundtable "European Air Defence: Funding, Frameworks and Future Decisions", in partnership with Baryon Investment Fund.

Senior military, industry, and investment leaders tackled three questions:
🔹 Where are the real gaps in Europe's layered air defence, especially along NATO's eastern flank?
🔹 What would it take to truly connect national, NATO, and EU systems so they work as one?
🔹 Where should the money go in the next 12 to 36 months?

The outcome: a shortlist of priority initiatives and follow-on working groups to turn discussion into action.

11/06/2026

Europe outspends Russia and China combined on defence. Yet it gets far less capability per euro.

The EU-27 collectively outspends both Russia and China, yet fragmented procurement, duplicated programmes, and a 78% reliance on non-EU suppliers ensure that spending rarely translates into capability.

This week's AGILE mandate - the trilogue on a €115M programme to move disruptive defence tech from the lab to the forces in weeks rather than years - is a rare design shift. But one instrument won't close a €250B/year gap.

The new GLOBSEC Competitiveness Tracker chapter, titled “Defence Financing in the EU: Needs, Ambitions and Progress” and authored by Philipp Lausberg, maps where the architecture is taking shape and where delivery is still failing.

The honest verdict? The tools exist. The political will to treat defence as a European public good does not yet exist.

📖 Read the full chapter: https://www.globsec.org/what-we-do/publications/defence-financing-eu-needs-ambitions-and-progress

11/06/2026

Can Europe remain competitive in a world defined by geopolitical rivalry?

🎙️ New episode of our podcast out now: https://youtu.be/-CZ93eFDTnk

10/06/2026

🤖 AI in the Real Economy: Accelerating Deployment Across Europe's Industrial Sectors

At the Forum side session, participants examined how Europe can accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence across industrial sectors while navigating governance frameworks, capital constraints and competitive pressures from the United States and China. The discussion focused on moving from regulation to implementation, with industrial application as Europe's clearest comparative advantage.

Key takeaways from the conversation:

🔹 Europe currently makes it easier to regulate AI than to deploy it. Governance frameworks have outpaced institutional capacity to implement them, and the AI Office should be reframed as a deployment-enabling platform rather than a compliance-enforcement body.
🔹 The largest competitive threat is not regulation but the investment gap in radical innovation. European enterprise investment has remained anchored in automotive for two decades, while the United States has cycled through hardware, software and AI.
🔹 Fleet-scale industrial deployment in logistics, robotics and warehousing is where AI benefits most visibly accrue in Europe, relying on partnerships between large platform companies and specialist European suppliers.
🔹 Regulatory uniformity across company sizes and geographies is a prerequisite for attracting capital. Rules that apply only to large firms pass compliance costs down the supply chain and create unintended barriers for SMEs.
🔹 Europe faces a demographic loss of roughly one million net workers per year, making AI and robotics adoption an economic necessity, and governments should frame workforce policy accordingly.

Can Europe shift from writing the rulebook on AI to leading its industrial deployment? Let us know in the comment section.

10/06/2026

Europe has a choice to make

10/06/2026

📡 FIRST LIGHT | One idea worth your morning

Brussels just stopped being only a regulator of the cloud. With the new Cloud and AI Development Act, it's trying to shape the market itself.

The headline read is "Europe vs. US hyperscalers." The reality is more interesting. The Act doesn't shut American providers out. It builds a four-tier sovereignty framework, from simple data residency at the bottom to full strategic autonomy at the top, and ties access to public contracts to where a workload sits on that ladder.

The mechanism is procurement. By making public-sector access depend on sovereignty tier, the EU is using its own purchasing power to steer where Europe's most strategic data lives, and which providers get to scale.

It's one of the clearest signals yet that Brussels now treats competitiveness, economic security and digital sovereignty as the same problem.

Read the full analysis from GLOBSEC's Geotech Centre 👇

GLOBSEC's Geotech Centre unpacks CAIDA's four-tier cloud sovereignty framework and what it means for EU and US cloud providers competing for public-sector contracts.

09/06/2026

Russia couldn’t display a single tank at its own Victory Day parade.

09/06/2026

08/06/2026

Europe can’t wait to decide if defending itself is feasible. It just has to start.

08/06/2026

📡 FIRST LIGHT | One idea worth your morning

Medicines used to be a health question. Now they're a question of economic security.

The EU has just built a new legislative architecture: the Critical Medicines Act, the Biotech Act and the Pharmaceutical Package, all designed to cut dependencies, speed up innovation and keep production on European soil. On paper, it's the most coherent framework Europe has ever had.

But the real test is geopolitical. If the US moves to regulate drug prices, capital looks elsewhere. China keeps expanding its biotech footprint through industrial policy. And Europe's own pricing systems still reward the lowest cost over secure supply. The risk: Europe writes the rules but ends up a spectator.

A clear structure is in place. Whether it delivers depends on implementation, investment and political unity.

Read the full commentary by Maria Brozmanova 👇
https://www.globsec.org/what-we-do/commentaries/access-innovation-and-supply-resilience-are-europes-new-survival-strategy

https://www.globsec.org/what-we-do/commentaries/access-innovation-and-supply-resilience-are-europes-new-survival-strategy