Para bellum: Assessing Europe’s industrial capacity to answer Europe’s new military budget increases

Lefeuvre, Élise

Para bellum: Assessing Europe’s industrial capacity to answer Europe’s new military budget increases

Files

defence-forces-review-2022-digital.pdf(169.15 KB)

Published Version

Date

2022

Authors

Lefeuvre, Élise

Publisher

Defence Forces Printing Press

Abstract

The Government of Ireland announced a significant military budget increase for the first time in decades. This is excellent news for the Irish Defence Forces that need capacity enhancement and new equipment. However, Ireland is not the only EU country to increase its military budget. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered several dramatic budget increases across EU countries. All these announcements have started to materialise into orders. Yet, the question is whether the military industry has the capacity to address such an inflow of new orders. The purpose of this article is to assess this capacity. The article looks at two companies, Rheinmetall and Thales, to understand their pipeline status and financing capacities. Pipelines are at an all-time high, and financing capacities have generally constrained leeway. Thus, the military industry will experience several bottlenecks, also due to an unfavourable macro-economic environment (e.g. higher energy and raw materials prices). In such a context, the Irish Defence Forces will most likely queue up for some times until ‘early birds’ and bigger customers are served.

Keywords

Ireland , Military budget increase

Citation

Lefeuvre, E. (2022) 'Para bellum: Assessing Europe’s industrial capacity to answer Europe’s new military budget increases', Defence Forces Review 2022, pp. 39-48. Available at: https://www.military.ie/en/public-information/publications/defence-forces-review/ (Accessed: 15 December 2022)