NATO’s defense spending is fueling Europe’s tech independence—what does that mean for US dominance?
In my previous article here on FOSS Force I wrote, “As silly as they are, if certain terms help to distinguish between fake and real innovation, so be it—unless they mask something else, but that’s the topic for next week.”
The term I had in mind is “resilience,” which I understand is becoming more and more popular among European VC investors for reasons summed up here and here:
- While funding for climate tech and, I’d guess, other fields too, has been dropping in the last couple of years, “technological sovereignty” and defense tech are quickly becoming, for some obscure reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, a huge money magnet all around Europe.
- However, “resilience” would be more acceptable than “defence” or even “sovereignty” for the many European politicians that are still too shy or pretentious to call a spade a spade. It would also be a much more diplomatic strategy for the EU if, just as a wild hypothesis, someday it had to deal with Mercurial, Arbitrarily Galling Allies.
- Last but not least, “resilience” would also be a much better catch-all phrase in Europe for firms looking to score some public LP money (that is, public-sector LP capital) and to hire or keep top employees, because it’s just as applicable to everything from healthcare to defense.
In a sense, this is hardly news. A pack of hunter-gatherers moving to the next foraging area as they’ve been doing since the Upper Paleolithic, just for money instead of food? “Nothing to see here, please disperse.”
Things become much more interesting, however, when you place all this European buzz about resilience side by side with the latest news from the last NATO summit, and what may actually happen.
Here in Europe, many voices argue that rearmament would not make Europe safer, but, both for simplicity and to make my main point, let’s ignore that concern today.
In the next few years, European startups aligning themselves with the “resilience” narrative may indeed get more money than those that don’t. Only last week, we saw President Trump declare a tremendous victory after NATO leaders endorsed a plan to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, and the European Commission declare that the EU needs to “build more bridges” between the civilian and military domains.
I assume that Trump—and many other US stakeholders—take it for granted, almost as if it were a divine right, that all this money should be spent on American-made weapons. Some US officials have even had the gall to openly object when Europeans push to buy weapons locally.
The reality may turn out quite differently. Framing the issue solely as “What if Europe had to defend herself without the Americans?” is misleading, or at best, incomplete. After all, it’s impossible to fully address that question without also considering its mirror image: What if a European country ever had to defend itself from the United States?
Interoperability among allied armies is surely necessary. Should American and European soldiers and pilots have to fight again side by side, they’d better have rounds of the same caliber, radar that immediately recognizes their respective planes as friendly, and so on, both to save lives and our tax money.
But interoperability isn’t the same as “just buy my stuff and nothing else, and everything will be good.” We FOSS folks have already seen how vendor lock-in played out with Microsoft, Oracle, and others—not to mention that certain risks are a lot easier to spot when they show up inside weapons instead of office suites.
The kill switch that would neuter F-35 fighter jets sold to US allies may be a myth, but Musk switching Starlink off to militaries he doesn’t like is impossible to unsee. Ditto for plain old dependence on spare parts. If Iran’s Air Force was never a match for Israel’s, it’s at least partly because Iran was forced to cannibalize its once-precious F-14 fighters—bought from the US—after the US embargoed all support for them. Real interoperability based on open hardware and software standards is good. Depending on a Very Unstable Ally for weapons isn’t.
The notion that “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” won’t hold up this time. If the current US administration gets its way and NATO members are pushed to spend 5% of their GDP on defense, it could easily backfire on US interests.
Rumor has it that the 5% increase in GDP spending has about as much truth as the recent “total obliteration of Iran’s nuclear capabilities” by US bombers, and that what actually happened at the NATO summit was just a great show to make Trump feel liked in Europe.
In practice, even if all the EU countries that agreed could find all that money—which is unlikely—much of it will never be spent on “resilience” startups or flashy US-made military gadgets. Instead, thanks to “creative accounting,” a lot of it will go to things like “training and troop salaries.”
It’s too early to tell whether the actual result will be good or bad for Europe, but it’s pretty unlikely to make the stockholders of US defense companies as happy as they would be if certain headlines were true.
Marco Fioretti is an aspiring polymath and idealist without illusions based in Rome, Italy. Marco met Linux, Free as in Freedom Software, and the Web pre-1.0 back in the ’90s while working as an ASIC/FPGA designer in Italy, Sweden, and Silicon Valley. This led to tech writing, including but not limited to hundreds of Free/Open Source tutorials. Over time, this odd combination of experiences has made Marco think way too much about the intersection of tech, ethics, and common sense, turning him into an independent scholar of “Human/digital studies” who yearns for a world with less, but much better, much more open and much more sensible tech than we have today.
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