Readiness 2030: The Acidity Test for the European Way of Doing Things
Can the whole continent act like a massive startup?
The European Union has never lacked big plans. There’s always a stream of ambitious programs promising transformation, innovation, and resilience, typically named after something epic plus some round number of a future year. The latest entry is an initiative called Readiness 20301 (after a diplomatic rebrand from the more bellicose “ReArm Europe”). Its mission: to pull Europe out of its long post-Cold War slumber and make it militarily coherent, industrially capable, and strategically self-reliant. A noble goal, for sure. However, in practice, Readiness 2030 may turn out to be something far more interesting: a stress test for the European way of doing things.
That way of doing things—heavily consultative, process-obsessed—is the elephant that quietly fills every room in Brussels. It is, by design, slow and cautious. Decisions are fermented over months of debate in consortia, then distilled through more committees, translated into a variety of languages, reviewed again for balance, and finally emerge as something that no one really opposes but no one is particularly excited about either. This is a feature; Europe, after all, is built on consensus and compromise. But there’s a question that should be floating around in every ministerial briefing: can such a system actually function when it matters most, and deliver?
Readiness 2030 is ultimately a statement that Europe can do urgency. That it can cut procurement cycles, dramatically increase advanced systems production, coordinate complex joint procurement across tens of defence ministries, and do it all without getting sucked back into the quicksand of technocratic humbug. There is money on the table; hundreds of billions of euros in redirected funding, strategic loan instruments, and reimagined investment flows. There is a formal strategy, with mechanisms that, on paper, look like they might even work. Someone, somewhere, is taking this seriously.
But to believe that Europe can transform its defence ecosystem in five years requires a strong stomach and some selective amnesia to forget how things have been done. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to navigate the compliance labyrinth ostensibly designed to streamline systems engineering, only to become a baroque obstacle where progress slows down and dies. Or ask those who’ve tried to build scalable solutions across member states, only to find that interoperability is a moving target defined simultaneously by many overlapping frameworks.
This is the same system now being told to produce advanced weapon systems, missile defence networks, interoperable satellite and drone fleets, and next-generation cyber defences at wartime speed. And to do so in harmony, with full alignment across nations that can’t even agree on how to regulate the curvature of bananas2. It’s heavily dependent on whether Europe can break, or at least temporarily suspend, its old habits.
The real enemy isn’t your typical autocratic country. The real enemy is inertia. It’s the slow glide into bureaucratic entropy that happens when good-spirited institutions become allergic to decisions. When accountability dissolves into process. When everything is so well planned that nothing is delivered.
This isn’t to say that Readiness 2030 is doomed. Quite the opposite: it might succeed. Investment is growing. Factories are expanding. There is movement in the right direction. But it will only succeed if it forces a deeper wake-up: that Europe cannot afford to manage existential threats with the same toolkit it uses for general policy and regulation. The usual playbook—committees, consensus, pilot programs, feasibility studies—has its place. That place just isn’t at the front line of defence reindustrialization.
One of the most corrosive ideas in European governance is that complexity equals sophistication. That the thicker the standard, the better the outcome. That consensus must always be sought, even if it requires the dilution of bold ideas. But what if complexity is just a trap? What if the process, instead of enabling interoperability, fault tolerance, and compatibility, has become a barrier to entry, especially for smaller actors who might otherwise contribute real innovation? What if the structures built to protect against failure are now actively preventing success?
Readiness 2030, whether its architects realize it or not, is an acid test for this philosophy. If Europe continues to equate structure with effectiveness, then the initiative will suffer under the weight of its own internal contradictions. Funds will be allocated but spent on documents and slides. Capabilities will be in preliminary design long past the hour they’re needed. But if the continent can suppress its own reflexes, it might yet pull this off.
What makes this moment so fascinating is not just the scope of the ambition, but the starkness of the choice. The deadlines are not abstract. The threats are not theoretical. The situation is not speculative. However, the system being asked to respond remains largely the same one that sleepwalked through decades of defence stagnation, confident that someone else—probably across the Atlantic—would carry the load.
Now, the assumption is kaput. The strategic umbrella is full of holes. The continent is faced with the rarest of conditions: a legitimate need, political will, and financial momentum. What remains to be seen is whether the institutions designed for peacetime can be retrofitted for purpose without collapsing under the pressure. Whether officials who have spent careers mastering the art of strategic delay can shift into execution mode. Whether the whole vast apparatus of European governance can be made to act with the urgency of a start-up and the discipline of a war room.
In many ways, Readiness 2030 is a mirror. It reflects back everything Europe says it believes about itself: smart, capable, cooperative, resilient, principled. It tests whether those beliefs hold when the shit hits the fan.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the success of Readiness 2030 depends on Europe acting in a way that is fundamentally un-European. Fast. Ruthless. Focused. Iterative. Intolerant of delay. Willing to trim, discard, and demolish sacred bureaucratic traditions in the name of operational, well, readiness.
That would be a Europe worth watching and worth working for. One capable of surprising even its most jaded critics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No._2257/94