Photo: Via Satellite archive photo

Europe is scrambling to bolster its defenses. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. Geopolitical shifts are underway. There’s a war on the Eastern frontier. And the Americans say they’re overstretched: they want Europe to get out from under its security umbrella.

In response, defense spending is rising across the continent. The big European powers, like France, Germany and the United Kingdom, are raiding foreign aid budgets, loosening debt brakes, and shifting to a ‘wartime economy.’ The problem here is that defense is not a simple question of spending enough money. There is a ‘how’ side to this which it’s vitally important Europe understands.

So ‘how’ is it now? In short, not great. Defense procurement is highly fragmented, extremely slow, and much too conservative. Duplication abounds. Supply chains have gaps. Massive legacy contractors receive the lion’s share of funding on the basis of reputation, not innovation. The overall approach follows a waterfall model – define, design, test, deliver – that was abandoned in the most successful industries years ago. All of this has to change – fast.

The good news for Europe is that it doesn’t have to run any experiments into what works. All it has to do is look at the blueprint provided by the U.S. Space Development Agency. The SDA, founded in 2019, represented a turning away from the traditional model of defense procurement and an embrace of a fast, modular, scalable approach. The historic assumption it challenged was that threats change slowly, that perfection was better than adaptability, and that resilience with regard to defense meant bespoke hardware, carefully built and refined according to set specifications. It concluded that in the modern world, threats were changing rapidly and all the time, that this made adaptability crucial, and that rapid innovation would be the measure of success.

The two principles that guide the SDA, and should guide European procurement, are spiral development on the one hand and proliferation on the other. The first was pioneered in the world of software. Briefly, it states that you should build a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and then improve it in spirals. So launch fast, learn fast, update often. That means that the systems can adapt to changing conditions and incorporate innovation from the commercial sector – crucial in a highly dynamic environment.

The second principle, proliferation, puts a premium on quantity over quality – or, in fact, understands that a high number of something, taken together, can amount to greater overall quality. Take satellites. Rather than build a small number of large, expensive satellites, the SDA builds many small, low-cost satellites. If one drops, the others can carry the burden. There is no critical core of satellites that, if attacked, could bring down the whole network. The satellites operate in the lowest orbital level, making them easier to update and replace than they would be if they were further from Earth. The network is cheaper and more resilient.

Consider what would happen if Europe did follow the SDA’s lead. It could take advantage of the wealth of knowledge and technical acumen spread across the continent and incubated in its world-class research institutions. It could incentivize defense innovation at breakneck speed, boosting the continent’s defenses while creating many civilian products as a byproduct. It could save money and increase the resilience of infrastructure. It could accelerate towards its longstanding goal of ‘strategic autonomy,’ allowing it to respond independently, as a bloc, to challenges as they evolved. It could bring about much greater resilience.

This – a change in Europe’s approach to procurement – is a conversation that it’s vitally important to have. Because while President Macron, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, soon-to-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz and all their counterparts across the continent try to find as much money for defense as possible in their budgets, no one is talking about how to use that money most effectively.

The risk of failing to enable and inspire innovation is far greater than the risk of sticking with the old model. We must make the move from bespoke hardware towards scalable, modular platforms. We must accelerate procurement, not by cutting corners but by embracing flexibility and iteration.

Jean-François Morizur is the co-founder and CEO of Cailabs. Cailabs designs, manufactures, and develops photonics solutions for the space, industrial, telecommunications, and defense sectors. He holds a PhD in Quantum Optics from the Australian National University and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Before founding Cailabs in 2013, he was a Senior Associate at the Boston Consulting Group. He is also the co-inventor of Cailabs’s Multi-Plane Light Conversion technology.‘