This is the Kiel Institute paper which provides costing to achieve military autonomy that excludes US. This clear evidence that a new structure for Europe following the clear messaging from America, including most recent inclusion of European commentary in recent Security paper which refers to Europe as a terrorist breeding ground. This from a country which promotes guerrilla tactics against its own citizens based on race or political persuasion.
European defense autonomy: Kiel Institute puts a price on it ⚑ A paper by five senior German defense economists and industry executives, published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, concludes European military autonomy is achievable: €50B/year for a decade, €150–200B by 2030. Ten specific capability gaps identified, including command and control, drone mass production, deep strike, and a European Starlink equivalent.
We identify ten central capability gaps that Europe must address on the path to autonomous capacity to act:
1. Command-and-control systems: Establishing a resilient command-and-control
system designed for contested communications environments, with a networked
architecture and delegated mission command down to the tactical level.
1May, 2026
2. Scaled autonomous systems: European mass production of drones and loitering
munitions with a capacity of several million units per year. Loitering precision
munitions and unmanned ground systems must be built up as a core European
production capability, rather than continuing the current practice of awarding
individual procurement lots.
3. Ground-based deep precision strike & sixth-generation air combat systems:
Development and production of European long-range precision weapons, ballistic
missiles, hypersonic capabilities, sixth-generation combat aircraft and unmanned
wingmen, with supply chains free from US export controls.
4. Air defence: Building a layered defence covering short-range counter-drone
capability, medium-range air defence and missile defence; affordable interceptors
and cost parity with the threat are central tasks.
5. Satellite reconnaissance & communications: Building a European satellite
constellation for reconnaissance, communications and navigation, so that Europe
becomes less dependent on Starlink, GPS and non-European data sources.
6. Space launch: Sovereign European access to space requires significantly higher
capacity across multiple launcher classes. In particular, the existing Ariane
programme must be complemented by small and medium launchers operating at
high cadence. In the long term, heavy-lift rockets with reusable stages will also
be needed.
7 . Persistent airborne ISR: Accelerated development of long-endurance
reconnaissance drones so that situational awareness can be maintained
continuously and fed directly into command-and-control and effects systems.
8. Military cloud, software & AI: Building a sovereign European data and AI
infrastructure that fuses information from multiple sources, processes it and
delivers it rapidly down to units in the field.
9. Strategic airlift and military operational support: Transport aircraft, air-to-air
refuelling, casualty evacuation, deployable military hospitals close to the area of
operations, and protection against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear
threats.
10. Electronic warfare, suppression and destruction of enemy air defences:
Europe must be able to disrupt or neutralise enemy sensors, communications
links and air defences in order to make its own operations against well-protected
adversaries executable.
This paper addresses German and European decision-makers. Germany, as holder of
the largest European defence budget, bears particular responsibility. The path to
European defence autonomy necessarily runs through the deployment of Germany’s
financial and industrial resources for European defence. A European strategy is also
necessary in the interest of German taxpayers, in order to prevent a continuation of the
severe inefficiencies caused by European fragmentation of defence. Joint European
financing must be used to build joint European capabilities.
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BACKGROUND RISK FROM US/ ISRAEL JOINT STRATEGY WHICH IS A AN OUTLIER AND STRUCTURALLY DIFFERENT THAN EUROPE CHINA AND OTHER POWERS STRATEGY.
The risks of kinetic counter-proliferation
The threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear programme has featured in US and Israeli efforts to justify their military operations against Iran. However, the use of force to counter nuclear proliferation seldom provides a solution to complex problems.
Iran’s nuclear programme has featured repeatedly in stated rationales from the United States for recent US–Israel-led military operations against the country. Beginning in late February 2026, the US military has repeatedly struck Iranian targets, killing the country’s political leadership as well as destroying Iran’s missile capability, navy and other military forces.
The latest campaign takes place after the Twelve-Day War in 2025, in which Israel struck military and nuclear targets, and the US struck three key nuclear sites – Natanz, Fordow and Esfahan – in Operation Midnight Hammer. The following eight months saw limited Iranian efforts to reconstitute its programme, suggesting some degree of military success in rolling back Iran’s capabilities.
However, the use of force to counter nuclear proliferation is not a new phenomenon. History shows a range of risks in kinetic approaches and suggests that the Iranian nuclear question will likely remain unresolved in the longer term.
The counter-proliferation mission
As US and Israeli military operations enter their fourth week, stopping Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear technology has featured among both states’ evolving explanations for their use of force. As the US military initiated major combat operations in Iran on 28 February 2026, US President Donald Trump stated the strikes would ‘ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon’.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated similar objectives, noting, ‘this murderous terrorist regime must not be allowed to arm itself with nuclear weapons that would enable it to threaten all of humanity’.
However, compared to Israel’s Operation Rising Lion and the United States’ Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, nuclear facilities have been low on the target lists of both countries. Indeed, three weeks into the current conflict, the US Central Command chief noted that more than 8,000 targets in Iran had been hit, while press reports suggest Israel has spent 12,000 munitions against targets in the country. Amid this enormous air campaign, just a handful of nuclear sites appear to have been targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This includes structures at Esfahan, sites that the IDF alleges were used innuclear component manufacture and in nuclear-weapons research. Most recently, the IDF targeted a plant for producing yellowcake (a powdered uranium concentrate produced between uranium mining and enrichment) and a heavy-water production plant designed to supply the Arak reactor, the core of which was filled with concrete as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
The 60%-enriched highly enriched uranium (HEU) – material in theory able to produce ten crude nuclear weapons and at the epicentre of the Iranian nuclear controversy – likely remains stored or buried in bombed facilities, in the damaged tunnel complexes at Esfahan or inside the damaged enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow.
The Trump administration has reportedly considered other options to neutralise Iran’s HEU, including a commando raid in enemy territory fraught with risks. The material, likely protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, remains one of the key cards that Iran holds.
Targeting nuclear programmes
Israel is no stranger to using force to counter the threat posed by nuclear proliferation. Iran has long been a target as the country pursued nuclear technologies and, from the late 1990s, a nuclear-weapons capability before allegedly halting the programme in 2003.
These earlier efforts included the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, and the deployment of cyber weapons such as the Stuxnet malware (purportedly with US involvement), which had destructive effects on Iran’s centrifuge programme.
Tel Aviv’s airstrikes against Iran’s programme in 2025 and 2026 are not without precedent. In 2007, in Operation Orchard, Israeli aircraft struck a secret reactor project under construction with North Korean support at Al Kibar in Syria. Back in 1981, a similar operation was undertaken against the Iraqi Osiraq reactor under construction close to Baghdad.
These operations formed part of the ‘Begin Doctrine’ – as then-prime minister Menachem Begin put it after the 1981 raid on Osiraq: ‘We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.’
Before Operation Midnight Hammer, US presidents had also considered using force against emerging nuclear threats, including against China in the 1960s, North Korea in the 1990s and during the first Trump administration.
Moreover, Trump’s decision to use force against Iran goes against his campaign promises to keep the US out of wars in the Middle East, following the costly twenty-year US presence in Iraq, coming after a war built on concerns over weapons of mass destruction and cooked intelligence assessments.
Unclear effects and unintended consequences
Operationally, striking facilities that may host nuclear material and other sources of ionising radiation can create clear hazards to people and the environment. More broadly, several factors will determine operational and strategic success in the use of force to counter proliferation.
Smaller and more nascent programmes can be easier to undertake focused strikes on. The 2007 Israeli strike on the secret reactor at Al Kibar, for example, was a project that appears to have had limited associated infrastructure.
This contrasts with Iran, which has a sprawling programme with a large numberof facilities, current and historical, known and unknown, and civil and military adjacent related to the nuclear programme spread across the country.
Military operations may not go as planned. The potential US commando raid to neutralise Iran’s HEU is reminiscent of the first ever counter-proliferation operation, when British commandos were used to neutralise a heavy-water plant at Telemark in Norway. Before the successful raid in 1943, an earlier attempt in 1942 saw a plane and gliders carrying British paratroopers crash with many fatalities.
Despite clear tactical prowess, as demonstrated by the Israeli 2024 raid on a missile-production facility at Masyaf in Syria, and US special forces capture ofNicolás Maduro in Caracas in January 2026, placing boots on the ground to seize or neutralise the HEU, in hostile territory with unclear intelligence, is fraught with risk. Verifiable removal will not be possible in a quick raid.
On a strategic level, the use of force to counter nuclear programmes can incentivise states to continue to pursue nuclear weapons. This was apparently the case following the Israeli strike on the Osiraq reactor in 1981, despite Iraq’s failed acquisition efforts.
This dynamic is heightened in cases where nuclear weapons are tied to regime survival, or where attacks are concurrently made against leadership targets, with attacks driving weapons aspirations if the regime survives.
The fates of a growing list of failed proliferators – Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gadhafi in Libya, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and now the regime in Iran – contrast with the relative success of the Kim regime in North Korea, which has succeeded in acquiring and consolidating a nuclear capability.
While airstrikes can deal a blow to nuclear facilities or kill scientists, as the US and Israeli operations over the past year have demonstrated, force can struggle to counter a proliferator’s knowledge base.
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi, in a recent interview, acknowledged that while the June 2025 US strikes in Operation Midnight Hammer appear to have been ‘quite effective’, Iran’s nuclear knowledge remains. He noted, ‘you cannot unlearn what you’ve learned’, including in Iran’s case, mastering highly sophisticated centrifuge technology.
Despite these risks, the use of force can be appealing, especially when the perception is that there are few good options.
The evolving Iranian nuclear dilemma
The attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025 and 2026, and Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and his decision to launch strikes in the face of negotiations underway in late February, suggest that the administration believes that neither deterring a nuclear Iran nor non-proliferation by agreement is a viable option.
At this point, the more immediate challenge for Washington involves Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. However, on the nuclear issue, the key question is whether the Trump administration, alone or together with Israel, will seek to consolidate the setback to Iran’s programme by conducting further strikes or, more crucially, by a ground operation involving special forces to remove or neutralise the HEU.
These options for consolidation hold risk and, in the case of boots on the ground, extraordinary risk. The alternative path – involving de-escalation – could effectively kick the can down the road and leave the nuclear issue unresolved if the Iranian regime survives.
Daniel Salisbury
Senior Fellow for Nuclear Arms Control, Non-Proliferation and Disarmament
Dr Daniel Salisbury
Senior Fellow for Nuclear Arms Control, Non-Proliferation and Disarmament
Based at IISS–Asia, Daniel Salisbury leads the IISS Nuclear Arms Control, Non-Proliferation and Disarmament research programme. His expertise lies in non-proliferation and the illicit trade in nuclear technologies and materials, as well as broader efforts to reduce nuclear risks.
Expertise
- Non-proliferation and arms control
- The illicit trade in nuclear technologies
- North Korea’s nuclear programme and sanctions
- British nuclear weapons
Background
Prior to joining the IISS, Daniel worked as a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey.
Daniel is the author of Secrecy, Public Relations and the British Nuclear Debate: How the UK Government Learned to Talk about the Bomb, 1970–1983 (Routledge Cold War History series, 2020). His forthcoming book, Feeding the Bear, explores the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc’s illicit procurement of Western technologies during the Cold War. He has published widely in a range of peer-reviewed journals and other outlets. He holds a BA in War Studies, an MA in Science and Security and a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.
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