The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said on Tuesday that she was frustrated about the bloc’s pace in scaling up its defense industry, which it plans to pour an additional $940 billion into by 2030.
“I share your frustration because I have this same feeling,” Kallas told a reporter in Brussels who asked about the rearmament effort. “Somehow, we haven’t seen the industry ramping up as we would have expected.”
Kallas said some European production had increased, including lines for ammunition, air defense, and critical capabilities.
But the EU foreign policy chief said that, at the same time, each member state is asking for more stock.
“I bring you one example that was raised today, and really needs to move faster, is the Procurement Directive. Many were raising this,” she said.
The Directive is an EU law that compels member states to open their contracts to defense manufacturers across the bloc, rather than rely on their domestic producers. While the law is meant to make the union’s defense network fairer and help avoid redundancies, it’s also been criticized as introducing too much bureaucracy.
Kallas added that defense firms were concerned the EU lacked clear rules, with every country trying to order systems and ammo based on its needs.
“The industry was saying also: ‘You have different rules everywhere, and it’s hard to operate,'” Kallas said. “Also, the standards, every member state is tweaking things a bit, so everybody has different orders, you can’t really produce in line like this.”
While the bloc has solved some issues, “there’s a lot to do,” she added.
The EU said in March 2025 that it hoped each member state would increase defense spending to 1.5% of its GDP by 2030. As part of that plan, the bloc said it would loosen fiscal rules to allow another $762 billion in spending over the next four years and create a $176 billion loan program for joint defense projects.
The boost aims to help Europe rearm amid fears of war with Russia, but the details remain murky, including who would spend the money and where the new funds would go. Plans from Brussels largely set the direction, while each EU member state decides how much to dedicate to defense and where to allocate the money.
The US, meanwhile, is poised to spend $962 billion on its military in its 2026 fiscal year, which ends on September 30. The Trump administration has said that it hopes to bump the defense budget to $1.5 trillion for the 2027 fiscal year.
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