TESTIMONY: Europe closes its technological defence gap — AGILE, their collective wager

June 25, 2026: the European Parliament votes

On June 25, 2026, the European Parliament adopts its position on the AGILE programme — Agile and Rapid Defence Innovation. This vote is no bureaucratic formality. It is the culmination of a painful awakening that began on February 24, 2022, the day Putin's tanks crossed the Ukrainian border and showed the entire world how profoundly Europe had neglected its technological defence for decades.

I do not claim to have been in the corridors of the European Parliament that day. But in closely following the debates on European defence since the invasion of Ukraine, I can testify to a real, profound, and accelerated transformation in the way Europeans think about their collective security. AGILE is its most recent and most ambitious expression.

What AGILE represents

The AGILE programme aims to close a systemic technological gap between Europe and its adversaries — and, let us be honest, its American allies. Drones, counter-drones, air defence, space systems, long-range precision strikes: these capabilities define the twenty-first-century battlefield, and Europe was structurally behind in all of them.

This testimony traces the journey of this European awakening — from Eurosatory 2026 through to the parliamentary vote, passing through the 15 billion EUR SAFE loan signed in June. It is the story of a continent learning, at forced speed, to defend its own values.

I have read dozens of analyses on Europe's technological defence gap — some alarmist, others euphemistic. The reality I perceive lies between the two: Europe has understood the problem, it has begun to act, but the road ahead remains long and strewn with industrial and political obstacles.

1,700 exhibitors, 50,000 visitors

From June 16 to 20, 2026, the Eurosatory defence salon in Paris brought together 1,700 exhibitors and 50,000 visitors — making it the largest defence show in Europe. That figure is not merely a commercial indicator. It reflects a European defence industry in full effervescence, fuelled by accelerated public procurement since 2022.

The technologies presented at Eurosatory were dominated by a central theme: technological acceleration. Reconnaissance drones, electronic warfare systems, autonomous ground vehicles, loitering munitions — everything that the war in Ukraine proved decisive was there, better, faster, deadlier. Europe is building its industrial response to the Ukrainian lesson.

The 15 billion EUR SAFE loan

On the sidelines of Eurosatory, European Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius signed on June 17, 2026 a SAFE loan of 15 billion EUR for France. SAFE — Safety and Affordability in European Defence — is the first direct arms-financing mechanism at EU level. This loan will fund military equipment acquisitions outside normal national budget constraints.

This is a quiet revolution in European defence governance. For the first time, the European Union is lending money directly to a member state to purchase weapons. The political taboo on European defence financing has fallen — and it will probably never rise again.

The 15 billion SAFE loan to France is a founding moment. Ten years ago, this idea was politically unthinkable. Today it is signed at a defence show in Paris. The speed of change is astonishing — and it was the war in Ukraine that made it possible.

What ITAR-free means

One of the most structurally significant decisions in the AGILE programme and the 2026 European Defence Fund is the adoption of the ITAR-free criterion as a declared priority. ITAR — International Traffic in Arms Regulations — refers to the American export control regime that subjects military technologies containing American components to prior Washington authorisation.

For Europeans, this dependency has become strategically unacceptable. If their defence systems contain American components, Washington can control their use — including for deliveries to Ukraine. The choice of the ITAR-free criterion in AGILE is therefore a declaration of strategic independence: Europe wants to decide alone to whom and how it delivers its weapons.

A break from American dependency

This ITAR-free orientation will create friction with Washington. Americans are accustomed to their technologies threading through allied systems — it is both a considerable revenue source and a political control lever. An Europe deciding to free itself from this provokes a necessary but painful adjustment in the transatlantic relationship.

For European defence engineers and industrialists, this criterion is a genuine technological challenge: designing competitive systems without American components is demanding and costly. But it is also an opportunity for European semiconductor, embedded software, and guidance systems sectors to develop on a secure and guaranteed market.

ITAR-free means Europe is telling itself: we will pay more in the short term to avoid depending on an ally that can change its president every four years. It is a painful but clear-headed long-term calculation. The Trump administration has probably accelerated this decision.

Drones, counter-drones, and air defence

The priority technologies identified by the AGILE programme are drawn directly from lessons learned in the war in Ukraine: drones and counter-drones first, multi-layered air defence, space systems (observation, secure communications), and long-range precision strikes. These four domains define the modern battlefield.

The war in Ukraine demonstrated that drones — from small artisanal FPVs to strategic drones like the Bayraktar — have fundamentally changed the logic of ground conflict. Counter-programming this revolution requires drone detection, jamming, and destruction systems at affordable cost. AGILE finances innovation in all these areas as a priority.

Space and precision strikes

Space systems — intelligence, navigation, and communications satellites — proved decisive in the war in Ukraine. Ukraine benefited from American and commercial intelligence (Starlink, Maxar) that allowed it to strike with precision. Europe must develop its own capabilities to avoid dependence on potentially vulnerable American or commercial systems.

Long-range precision strikes — cruise missiles, guided munitions, strategic strike drones — form the fourth pillar of AGILE. Europe had largely neglected this capability after the Cold War. The war in Ukraine showed that deep-strike capacity is essential to degrade adversary capabilities from a safe distance.

What strikes me about AGILE's priority list is that it reads like an inventory of the gaps revealed by Ukraine. It is a list built in urgency and in pain — the pain of Ukrainian soldiers who fought without these capabilities for months. Let us not forget that.

Military mobility hampered by borders

On June 23, 2026, the European Parliament advances toward what is being called the "Military Schengen" — a system of free military mobility between EU member states. Today, the movement of military equipment between European countries is subject to administrative and customs procedures that can take weeks.

This bureaucratic slowness is strategically absurd in a context where reaction speed is a survival condition. If a crisis erupts on the EU's eastern border, it must be possible to move German armoured vehicles to Poland, French helicopters to the Baltic States, without waiting weeks for administrative authorisations. The Military Schengen aims precisely to remove these obstacles.

The political challenges of military mobility

Implementing the Military Schengen raises sensitive sovereignty questions. Some member states are reluctant to allow foreign troops to cross their territory without formal oversight procedures. Infrastructure — roads, bridges, tunnels — must be dimensioned for heavy military equipment, requiring significant civil-military infrastructure investments.

But in the urgency of 2026, these reservations are fading. The Russian threat to the east, documented by the war in Ukraine, is a powerful political accelerator. Member states that would have hesitated in 2018 are today accepting sovereignty compromises that were politically impossible before February 2022.

Military Schengen strikes me as one of the most important institutional innovations in European integration since Schengen itself. Removing borders for military forces — that is finally treating collective defence as a reality and not an aspiration.

An unprecedented collective objective

The EU Readiness 2030 objective sets 900 billion USD collectively as the European military effort by the end of the decade. This is an ambitious target representing a near-doubling of current spending for many members. For perspective: the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction after the Second World War amounted to approximately 130 billion USD in current value. The effort demanded of Europe today is of an entirely different order of magnitude.

This figure of 900 billion is not attributable to a single institutional decision — it is the aggregation of national commitments, European funds, and mechanisms like SAFE and the European Defence Fund. The coherence of this collective effort remains a major political challenge: each country has its own priorities, its own industries to protect, its own political sensitivities.

The industrial reality behind the figures

The 900 billion EUR cannot be spent easily. The European defence industry is fragmented, with costly duplication — each country prefers to buy domestically when possible. Equipment standardisation between European allies remains insufficient, which limits interoperability and increases support costs.

The AGILE programme, with its rapid innovation approach and ITAR-free criteria, attempts to create a common industrial base for disruptive technologies. This is as important a methodological shift as the change in budget amounts. Europe is learning to innovate in defence — not merely to buy American licences.

900 billion looks impressive on paper. But money does not transform into operational military capabilities by magic. Industrial execution, political coordination, technical standardisation — that is where Europe's ambition will prove itself or fail.

Europe as a strategic supplier

For Zelensky and Ukraine, Europe's technological build-up is not abstract. It is the promise of additional ammunition, more capable air defence systems, more effective drones, strike capabilities that can shift the balance on the ground. Every euro invested in AGILE is potentially an investment in Ukraine's survival.

Europe is now the primary military supplier to Ukraine — ahead of the United States in some equipment categories. This transformation is unprecedented in the history of European integration. The EU was never supposed to be a military actor — and here it is, financing weapons for a country at war on its eastern flank.

Deterrence as a peace investment

The AGILE programme, the 900 billion of EU Readiness 2030, the SAFE loan, Military Schengen — all of this converges on a single objective: ensuring Europe is never again in the position of vulnerability it occupied in February 2022. A Europe capable of collective self-defence is a Europe less tempting as a target for Putin or any other authoritarian actor.

It is paradoxical but true: spending on defence is investing for peace. Solid defence discourages aggression. A disarmed Europe invites military adventurism. The AGILE programme is, in that sense, a long-term peace programme — even if it produces drones and munitions in the short term.

When Europe votes for AGILE, for drones and missiles, it is not glorifying war. It is drawing the lesson from the war Ukraine is fighting in its place. And this collective testimony — that of a continent rearming to avoid having to fight — is perhaps the most powerful political message of this decade.

The challenge of cross-border military procurement

Realising AGILE's ambitions rests on a structural change in European military procurement habits. For decades, European armies have preferred American equipment — better integrated, benefiting from long operational experience, and covered by Washington's political guarantees. This rational short-term choice created a structural dependency that now weakens European strategic autonomy at precisely the moment it is needed.

The ITAR-free criterion imposed in the 2026 European Defence Fund changes the game: equipment selected for European co-financing must be exportable and deployable without prior Washington authorisation. This is a cultural revolution in procurement habits that will take years to implement across all member armies.

Eurosatory 2026 as a signal of industrial acceleration

The 1,700 exhibitors and 50,000 visitors at Eurosatory Paris in June 2026 are not merely a commercial statistic. They represent the effervescence of a European defence industry that knows it has entered a period of sustained demand for at least a decade. Accelerated public procurement, available European funds, and the collective post-Ukraine awareness create an industrial environment radically different from 2019.

For European defence technology SMEs — startups in drones, cybersecurity, communications systems — this context is a historic opportunity. AGILE, through its rapid innovation logic, is precisely designed to allow these actors, more agile than major groups, to directly contribute to European military capabilities on much shorter timelines than the traditional procurement cycle.

I realise how difficult this industrial revolution is to see from the outside. Lines of code, electronic components, factories running around the clock — that is less spectacular than armoured vehicles rolling. But that is where the real race for European defensive capabilities is being decided.Eurosatory 2026 told me something important: Europe has decided to take its defence seriously industrially. It is not done — but the decision is made. And when Europe truly decides, it has an industrial execution capacity that the whole world ends up respecting.

A historic turning point, slowly owned

The European Parliament vote on AGILE on June 25, 2026 is not a spectacular event. It is not a Churchill speech on the radio or a Normandy landing. It is a committee vote, followed by a press release, in a parliament that rarely makes the front page. But in twenty years, we will likely look back at this vote as one of the moments when Europe decided to take its own security in hand.

The story of European defence post-2022 is one of painful resilience. It began in the shame of unpreparedness, continues in the urgency of industrial reconstruction, and will end — if Europeans honour their commitments — in unprecedented collective capability.

The testimony of a columnist

In testifying to this transformation through the texts, votes, and figures that reach me, I feel something I would not have thought to write five years ago: pride in Europe. Not naive or convenient pride — but that of a continent learning, slowly and with difficulty, to be equal to its own values.

The AGILE programme, the 15 billion EUR from SAFE, the 50,000 visitors at Eurosatory, Military Schengen — all of it says the same thing: Europe no longer wants to be protected by others. It wants to participate, contribute, decide. This is a shift in strategic identity as profound as the creation of the euro. And it is happening before our eyes.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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