2026-09-17 04:37:11
Chinese ZPMC cranes supplied to American ports contained cellular modems that could bypass firewalls, gather information, and disrupt cargo handling. Chinese Yutong buses sold to Oslo came with connected battery and power controls. The Norwegian city’s public transport authority, Ruter, warned that, in theory, the buses “can be stopped or rendered inoperable by the manufacturer.”
Chinese connected vehicles carry cameras, microphones, and location sensors that gather data. Chinese-supplied apps, such as Hikvision’s Hik-Connect, send phone and SIM card identifiers to Chinese servers.
The West long has identified Chinese-supplied telecoms as a danger. It must now wake up and confront the danger of a vast array of Chinese products, ranging from cranes to cameras. Allies need to avoid instituting counterproductive sovereignty requirements. They should build a shared response that limits exposure by private purchase of Chinese consumer goods.
Without action, innocuous looking products will flood the market. A family buys a solar inverter. It looks like an ordinary private purchase, made by a family that chose Chinese because the product was good and affordable. The problem arises if the manufacturer can change the operation of thousands of these devices and threaten the grid.
Can the grid operator prevent such switching, without the manufacturer’s permission? If it can, there is no reason to ban the devices. If switching off thousands of inverters can cause a blackout, China holds dangerous digital leverage.
This threat is not theoretical. The International Energy Agency warns of blackouts from malicious software updates to inverters. Whoever controls enough connected capacity could spread disruption across borders before grid operators restore control. Chinese Deye inverters have stopped working, with warnings that US use was prohibited. China supplies more than 80% of inverter shipments to Europe.
Similarly, data from thousands of privately owned connected cars and cameras, combined through the cloud, can reveal infrastructure data, military supply routes, and activity around military sites. If a Chinese camera or microphone is placed near a military gate, it can capture conversations outside the frame. With cloud or support access, China could combine video, sound, locations, and timestamps from cameras and vehicles, identifying visitors, military supply routes, and daily routines.
A single, seemingly minor private purchase of a connected vehicle, camera, or home solar inverter suddenly becomes a major national security risk.
Alongside worries about Chinese tech, Europeans are questioning the dangers of US technology. An authorized CrowdStrike update for Windows disrupted critical services across industries and borders. The European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act rightly addresses concentration, continuity, and foreign legal reach.
But the example of connected cars shows why the US and China are not the same. For a specific commitment by a US supplier on data use, an enforceable contract and an independent audit may be sufficient because they are backed by effective judicial protection, democratic laws, and independent oversight of intelligence services. There is a way to verify the manufacturer’s promise and hold the company to it.
In contrast, the Chinese state can, under its intelligence law, secretly demand access without effective independent review, so a Chinese manufacturer’s promise is not enough. Independent technical verification must then show that access is blocked. If less restrictive measures cannot contain the risk, a ban on that specific use case may be justified.
Allies need to forge a common response. My proposal is a common methodology, Digital Strategic Exposure (DSE), that assesses not only the device, but the cloud, subcontractors, and jurisdictions in which manufacturers operate. The aim is to limit dangerous digital leverage.
Under DSE, Europe would gain a legally defensible way of making decisions to exclude Chinese products where risks cannot be contained, without unnecessarily excluding American technology. Partners could compare their reasoning without sharing confidential evidence. DSE should become a pressure valve for easing transatlantic tensions and preventing a technological split in the West.
The US and the European Commission should run pilot programs in surveillance, energy, transport, and critical cloud and AI. NATO should set collective defense requirements and assess cross-border effects. National teams retain sensitive evidence; EU and national authorities keep regulatory and procurement powers.
My proposal offers a way through the transatlantic sovereignty dispute. Europe gains verifiable control while Washington can address dangerous dependencies without asking allies to copy its bans. Local control, limits on data aggregation, and tested continuity or exit can preserve access to useful American technology. Restrictions remain possible where narrower measures fail.
Humanoid robots raise the stakes: cameras, microphones, and wireless updates in machines that move and act. Uncontrolled digital dependence could soon walk into our factories and homes. We must bring it under control before they arrive.
The bottom line is that allies should de-risk from dangerous leverage, not from one another.
Đuro Lubura is Special Advisor to Croatia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure. He leads high-level interagency working groups on national security issues and critical infrastructure, including the group drafting Croatia’s regulation on security risk assessment for electronic communications equipment. He completed Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executives in National and International Security program and holds IAPP’s Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP) and Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) certifications. He has held senior positions in the military, police and intelligence services. He writes in a personal capacity.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-09-17 03:34:09
Ukraine’s 3 Army Corps, acting under strict operational silence, has been conducting a counterattack in the Lyman sector for months. The cloud of secrecy has now been lifted, and Russian forces have lost a significant amount of territory. The operation, named Vivaldi, has so far officially cleared 75 sq km (29 sq miles), Ukrainian forces say. It is not yet over.
“In Vivaldi, as you know, there are four seasons,” Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky said on September 15. “And this is only the first . . . Good news is coming.”
Russia’s leadership had hoped to encircle Ukraine’s formidable fortress belt in western Donbas, but the northern salient has been reduced, with Russian warbloggers claiming it will extend the battle for Donbas by a year. Credible independent sources say the Ukrainian territorial gain is even greater.
Ukraine has also been making effective use of mid-range strikes to hit Russia’s rear, softening defenses, and then using troops to retake ground. Kyiv’s forces have benefited from Russian commanders falsifying reports about their progress, leading to a lack of reinforcements and allowing Ukraine to seize the initiative. The UAF says more than 1,500 Russians have been killed and wounded, and 12,000 drones destroyed along with hundreds of vehicles.
The key to the counteroffensive was Ukraine’s combined arms effort. Much like the surprise offensive into Kursk in 2024, it demonstrated that mechanized assaults and heavy armor are still important on the battlefield in the right circumstances.
The Lyman offensive shows Ukraine is improving its deployment of combined arms, a tactic it struggled to deliver during its unsuccessful counteroffensive in 2023. In the race to adapt, both sides have sought to develop the countermeasures and conditions required to restore maneuverability to the battlefield.
In July, a Russian mechanized assault in Maiak featured the Arena-M active protection system (APS), which had been modified to defend tanks against first-person view (FPV) drones. Dmytro Putiata, a Ukrainian veteran and drone warfare expert, said the Ukrainians had found the system hard to break down.
The system on just one tank “destroyed seven FPV drones,” Putiata wrote on Twitter/X. “In general, it took 15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank (there were seven of them).”
Not every sector, or every terrain, is appropriate for the use of heavy armor, and commanders are having to adapt to different combat environments.
In the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk-Zaporizhzhia sector, Yurii, a drone operator with Ukraine’s 23rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, said tanks were scarce.
“The main focus right now is on small infantry groups moving on foot or on all-terrain vehicles, supported by drones as they advance,” he said in an interview. “In our sector, tanks are very rare because of the large kill zone extending in both directions.”
The concept of combined-arms warfare hasn’t changed, but the older doctrines for its use are becoming outdated.
“Tanks are used noticeably less often compared with previous years,” said Viktor, a tank operator from Ukraine’s 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade. “The survivability of the vehicles themselves has also declined because the enemy is using more advanced strike UAVs and sectors of the front have become more difficult for concealing vehicles.”
He said a wide spectrum of measures are being deployed to adapt to the drone threat and restore mobility, including improved electronic warfare systems, both on heavy armor and for soldiers, protective structures welded onto tanks, and monitoring of the sky and coordination with electronic warfare (EW) units to determine the best time to carry out a mission.
Kyiv is also deploying mobile counter-drone teams and scaling drone interceptor units to combat the threat.
The new style of Ukrainian combined assaults has produced important results, such as in Lyman, but a major breakthrough will still be very difficult. Much like Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, any limited breakthrough will face barrages of artillery and drones.
And the further forces move from supply routes, the greater the danger. Ukraine is also attempting to innovate by using heavy bomber drones to help ensure logistics in the sky.
“Despite the difficulty in ground operations maneuver observed in eastern Ukraine over the past few years, offensive operations are still possible in modern war,” wrote retired Australian General Mick Ryan. “But they need the intellectual effort to develop new techniques to make them viable and repeatable at scale.”
Both Kyiv and Moscow are making the “intellectual effort” and experimenting with how best to adapt to drone-saturated skies.
For its part, Ukraine is showing that mechanized maneuver remains possible but, as new technologies emerge, including autonomous systems, both sides will need better institutional adaptation, new doctrines, and the ability to quickly implement and learn from new technologies.
For now, Ukraine’s drone-led counteroffensives are leading the way, but we may soon see more tanks accompanying them.
David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American freelance journalist who has been covering Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, and is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-09-17 02:29:24
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan cut ties with the Soviet Union more than three decades ago, and have developed their own economies and foreign policies. Yet in the critical area of energy security, not much has changed; they remain heavily dependent on the Kremlin’s goodwill.
The crisis began to unfold this spring and summer, as Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on Russia’s refineries got increasingly successful. On July 6, drones reached the Omsk refinery for the first time, some 2,700 km (1,700 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and Russia’s largest refining facility was forced to halt production.
Omsk, the eleventh major gasoline producer to be struck, was the principal supplier of petroleum products to Central Asia and Mongolia. And disruption followed as Moscow prioritized supplying its own regions with fuel.
While it was never part of the Soviet Union, Mongolia is the most vulnerable to the shock, as more than 90% of its petroleum products come from Russia. Lines formed at filling stations in Ulaanbaatar and significant restrictions on fuel sales were introduced.
The warning signs had appeared earlier in the year, when China banned exports of petroleum products after the disruption to oil flows caused by the US/Israeli war on Iran. Mongolian officials acknowledged that Russian imports would temporarily have to meet the country’s entire fuel demand as there was effectively no alternative.
Kyrgyzstan is also “completely dependent” on Russian gasoline, according to President Sadyr Japarov, and has accelerated the development of a new refinery with an annual capacity of 450,000 tons. Its first phase could cover a quarter of national demand, and Japarov says it will need at least two more plants to provide its own gasoline supplies.
In July, Russian gas deliveries to Tajikistan fell by half, while Russian aviation kerosene supplies stopped altogether. Dushanbe sought replacement volumes from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan but with limited success.
Tajikistan negotiates its annual fuel-supply volumes with Russia, but the arrangement resembles a recurring political bargain more than an ordinary market transaction.
Uzbekistan was less affected than its neighbors, as it has domestic refining capacity that covers part of its demand, but Russia still supplies nearly half of its gasoline.
With three operating refineries, Kazakhstan meets almost all its own domestic petroleum-product needs and suffered the least. Yet it could offer little assistance to its neighbors because of limited spare capacity.
It produces around 90 million tons of oil annually, but most is exported as unrefined crude, and only about 18% is refined domestically. The idea of building another refinery has been under discussion for 17 years.
The crisis has exposed structural vulnerabilities that matter more than the immediate challenges to supply.
All five countries are landlocked, and alternative supply routes must cross neighboring states, including Russia or China. The Caspian Sea offers a potential route for petroleum products from Azerbaijan and, eventually, Iran, but developing such alternatives requires infrastructure, commercial agreements, and political commitment.
The region has already seen how price rises can ignite mass unrest. Kazakhstan’s protests in January 2022 began with a sharp rise in gas prices, and fuel queues and dramatic price increases in Mongolia and Tajikistan are not merely economic problems but could rapidly become political flashpoints.
Moscow has historically used preferential fuel prices as an instrument for maintaining political influence and loyalty, but its capacity to do so has been severely curtailed.
It is remarkable that a region so rich in oil and gas cannot reliably supply itself with refined petroleum products, and that several states are still exposed to the insecurity of having a single supplier.
It is reasonable to ask if this is simply the result of market failures and weak investment, or if it was always the Kremlin’s intent. Dependency creates leverage, and leverage is a central instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy.
The region has sufficient crude-oil resources for a joint refinery capable of meeting a large share of its demand, yet no such project has materialized during 35 years of independence.
One explanation is commercial: oil companies may find it more profitable to export crude at world prices than to refine it and sell to markets where governments seek to maintain low consumer prices. Large refining projects also require long-term demand guarantees, stable regulation, financing, and agreement on how costs and benefits will be shared.
These obstacles are real, but they are not insurmountable. A regional strategy could combine new refining capacity, diversified import routes, strategic fuel reserves, and more transparent pricing.
And, crucially, such measures would reduce the ability of any single supplier to turn any disruption into a strategic crisis.
The central lesson is straightforward: formal independence and genuine energy sovereignty are not the same thing. Central Asia has spent 35 years building the former, the latter needs to follow.
Sergiy Makogon is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a seasoned executive and energy expert with over 20 years of expertise in the Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European (CEE) gas markets, as well as European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-09-16 04:53:36
Until recently, governments controlled the means to wage war. No longer. Private companies own and manage critical military infrastructure like satellites, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Call it the switch power. For policymakers, the shift in control deserves attention.
The clearest early signal of switch power came in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces were preparing a naval drone strike against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet off occupied Crimea. The operation depended on Starlink. Elon Musk declined to activate it, arguing the strike risked excessive escalation. No government could force immediate activation; no alliance mechanism stepped in; Kyiv had no recourse beyond persuasion.
It’s a dangerous dependency. Even though most of the key switch companies are American, they often balk at following orders and find themselves in conflict with the US government — or held hostage by hostile governments. For Europe, reliance on US companies sits awkwardly alongside ambitions for strategic autonomy.
Competition to the Starlink monopoly is emerging. Amazon is building what it now calls Amazon Leo, formerly Project Kuiper; Europe is investing in its own Starlink rival IRIS². France recently hosted an International Space Summit to build Europe’s sovereign space capabilities. The US is attempting to carve out a secure military use of Starlink called Starshield.
But dependence has grown faster than alternatives can be built. In the meantime, governments would do well to treat this as a standing condition rather than a one-off failure to be fixed and forgotten.
Governments have relied on defense contractors for centuries without losing strategic control over the relationship. Switch power requires four conditions:
Starlink met these conditions during the Crimea strike: it linked navigation, command, targeting, and execution into a single chain, and no alternative could have been fielded on the relevant timeline.
In 2026, Ukrainian officials said SpaceX disabled the Starlink access that Russian drones depended on. Washington received a lesson during operations against Iran when SpaceX reportedly raised prices for military satellite services as demand grew, and the Pentagon paid because replacing that capability mid-campaign was unrealistic.
A private company not only can change prices or contract terms mid-conflict. It can pick sides, or even carry out policies its country of origin opposes. Hostile governments can apply pressure by closing market access or imposing regulations that hurt businesses. Sometimes private companies refuse orders. The Pentagon ended up in litigation against Anthropic after the AI company refused contract terms permitting mass surveillance and use of autonomous weapons — a dispute that left a procurement decision hostage to a courtroom timeline rather than an operational one.
Taiwan is where the stakes are clearest. Beijing does not need to attack American satellites directly to blunt US military effectiveness around the island; it can lean instead on the commercial exposure of firms doing business in China. Chinese authorities froze expansion plans for Tesla’s Shanghai factory, citing data security concerns tied to the rollout of Starlink over Ukraine.
Redundancy needs to be operational: a backup provider listed in a procurement annex is not the same as one that can actually assume a mission mid-conflict. Contracts should treat political refusal as seriously as technical failure, spelling out crisis-activation terms, territorial restrictions, and data portability with the same rigor applied to cost and delivery schedules. Militaries should rehearse not only the loss of a platform or a network, but the loss of the company that operates it.
Few defense ministries currently have such a plan on file. Governments will still decide when they want to fight. Increasingly, though, their freedom to act is conditioned by who holds a switch. That is a question most governments have not yet asked — or answered.
Nikola Lunić is a Serbian analyst and Navy Captain (Ret.). He previously served as Serbia’s Defence Attaché in London and Oslo and as Executive Director of the Council for Strategic Policy. He is a Strategic Affairs Consultant and a regular guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. His analysis has appeared in CEPA, New Eastern Europe, and Kyiv Post, among other outlets.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-09-16 01:46:17
At 3:45 in the morning on September 13, a Ukrainian railway official woke me with one urgent Ukrainian word: Evacuatia.
I was on a train from Kyiv to Poland. There was no time to dress, so I joined the stream of passengers pouring out of the train in my cotton nightgown and slippers.
It was pitch black.
It wasn’t enough to be off the train. We needed distance from the carriages to be safe from drone shrapnel. The ground was uneven, and I held onto the arm of a tall man because, under the circumstances, falling seemed an especially bad idea.
I’m 85, and this was my seventh reporting trip to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. I’ve been in places where the air-raid sirens sound so often that people barely look up. I’ve interviewed torture survivors, amputees and children whose education is repeatedly interrupted by races to bomb shelters.
Still, until Sunday morning, I had never had to run from a Russian drone myself. The alarm was well-judged: we soon heard the thud of an explosion and later learned that it had hit the railroad track behind us. One passenger, a former member of the CIA, estimated that it was between 100 and 200 meters away.
After perhaps 20 minutes outside, we were given the all-clear and returned to the train.
My train was carrying Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director and commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. A diplomatic train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt and other prominent visitors had traveled through the same area shortly before.
Ukrainian Railways told me the attacks were aimed at the Bildt/Johnson train. It’s hard to be sure, but we do know that on September 2, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s security council and leader of Putin’s political party, made a clear threat against foreigners visiting Kyiv.
Angered by Ukraine’s increasingly effective strikes across Russia, Medvedev said Western leaders were behind the campaign.
“Every act of terror has its sponsors,” he wrote on Telegram. “At the moment, these are the leaders of Western countries, primarily European ones. And they often travel to Kyiv by train . . . ”
Back on the tracks, the situation was about to get worse.
The train moved forward and then, I can only guess how long the interval was, maybe half an hour, the train stopped, and we were told again to evacuate. This time I was dressed.
The second evacuation was more urgent. We got out and moved away from the train, and then came an enormous boom nearby.
There was acrid smoke, enough that I began coughing and my lungs were burning. At the time, in the darkness and confusion, I thought the smoke was coming from a church near the railway. Later, after seeing photographs taken by people traveling with me, I learned I was wrong: the strike had hit the engine of a train that was parked adjacent to us. There were several passenger trains and two fuel-tank trains bunched up and not moving because of drone activity.
Then came the third attack, and it was hair-raisingly different.
Suddenly you could tell from the conductor’s voice that this time was truly urgent. I’m told that officials know from radar and other sources how far drones are, and in this case, everyone was shouting: “Run! Run!”
I remember thinking that I could grab a blanket because it was cold outside. It would have taken three seconds.
I didn’t take the three seconds.
We ran.
We were told that the objective was to get at least 200 meters from the train and more would be far better. We crossed a wet, marshy field, in places running over old wooden planks that were beginning to rot.
Then we heard the drone.
I have trouble describing that sound without resorting to something unjournalistic like “the world’s nastiest sound.” It reminded me of the sound of angry hornets. It was approaching and getting louder.
We kept running.
My lungs began burning. Then they felt as if they were bursting. Eventually I couldn’t keep up with the others, but I was still moving forward. I had always imagined that with enough adrenaline you could do anything, but there came a point where I just couldn’t keep up.
We reached the shore of a lake, and passengers scattered into nearby bushes and shrubbery.
The idea was to crouch low, both to make ourselves less visible and to reduce our exposure to shrapnel if something exploded nearby. Had we been out in the open on the lakeshore, the advice was to lie flat and present as small a target as possible.
So there we were, passengers from an international train crouching under bushes at dawn while Russian drones flew overhead.
Some people were crying.
Several small terrier-sized dogs looked as if they understood perfectly well that something was terribly wrong.
My traveling companion Clara asked me if I was cold.
Until she mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed the cold at all.
At one point, two young women remained standing while the rest of us were crouched down, making ourselves invisible in the bushes. People began shouting at them in Ukrainian to sit.
I don’t know enough Ukrainian to translate their exact words, but I understood the tone.
It was not: “Would you mind sitting down?”
Eventually a drone passed us. We heard another explosion and later learned that it had been intercepted by Ukrainian forces.
A locomotive on the tracks adjacent to the carriage Gen. Petraeus and I had been traveling in had been hit. Railway tracks were damaged. A gas station or gas storage facility close to us was hit and exploded. Another Russian strike hit near the border crossing. The crossing with Poland was closed for at least six hours, leaving passenger trains backed up close to one another. On parallel tracks beside us stood two long freight trains made up of tank cars.
For anyone who has traveled regularly in wartime Ukraine, the railway is a lifeline.
Ukraine’s airspace is closed to normal civilian flights, which means the trains are the main way of connecting Ukraine with Europe. Ukrainians use them to visit family, travel to work or flee danger. Diplomats, aid workers, journalists and foreign supporters use them to enter the country.
One purpose of attacking that corridor seems obvious, whatever the intended individual target may have been: make people afraid to use it.
Make foreigners reluctant to enter Ukraine.
Make Ukrainians feel increasingly cut off from Europe.
Make the danger seem to extend right up to NATO’s doorstep.
When we finally crossed the border into Poland, a Polish border guard spoke to me in a friendly way. “I bet you won’t be taking that train again,” he said.
“Yes, I will,” I answered. “As soon as I possibly can.”
Later, I talked with fellow passengers about what the attacks meant and how serious an escalation they represented.
We use the phrase “hybrid warfare.” But passengers who were part of the conversation agreed that we should remember the second word, “warfare”. Why are we so afraid of Putin that we hesitate to take seriously what is happening in front of us?
Russian drones have just attacked a civilian rail corridor carrying grandmothers and children. On my train, the passengers were almost all women. The passengers crouching in those bushes were not soldiers. We were people trying to get from Ukraine to Poland.
This is now increasingly common as Russia hits trains across the country, used by ordinary people to go about their business. Like the strikes on apartment blocks, shopping malls and buses, the growing aim is to kill and terrorize the civilian population.
There is an old warning: “He who endures an old injury with restraint invites a new one.”
There is something Congress can do about it right now, as opposed to enduring what Russia is doing without a serious response. The Senate has already passed the Lindsey Graham Russia sanctions legislation by an overwhelming 86–11 vote, and the House Rules Committee is scheduled to consider it. The House should pass it.
Putin has just given us another demonstration of what we are up against.
It is time for us to get serious and do something about it.
Mitzi Perdue is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MPA from the George Washington University. As a journalist and war correspondent, she has reported extensively from Ukraine and is the co-founder of Mental Help Global, an initiative using AI to expand access to mental health support in conflict-affected regions.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2026-09-16 00:30:00
Volkswagen, the world’s second-largest auto manufacturer, is slashing 100,000 jobs. Auto suppliers Bosch and ZF are cutting tens of thousands more, putting at risk a combined 350,000 jobs across the continent.
But behind the grim news, there’s hope: Europe’s struggling automakers are diversifying into defense manufacturing. Israel’s Rafael signed a letter of intent to take over Volkswagen’s 2,300-worker Osnabrück factory. It plans to build Iron Dome launchers, generators and trucks. Renault has cleared a 5,000-square-meter hall to assemble Chorus strike drones. Auto supplier Schaeffler is selling electronics parts to German drone maker Helsing.
Europe’s defense and car industries make natural partners. They require similar skills. One is growing. The other is declining, bloodied by Chinese competition and the transition to electric vehicles. By working together, the two can offset the pain and increase the continent’s security — provided they can overcome several obstacles.
Europe’s defense industry needs to scale. European NATO members’ defense spending is on track to grow from 1.3% of GDP in 2023 to 3.5% by 2035. According to McKinsey, budgets have already doubled since 2019, growing by nearly €250 billion, and are set to rise by a further €300 billion over the next five years. Unmanned fleets across air, land, and sea that fuse robotics with artificial intelligence, represent key priorities.
The automotive industry brings a ready-made stack to meet this demand: plants, process discipline, quality systems, compliance, engineers, and shop floor workers. Both cars and military equipment require machining and powertrains, electric drives, batteries, actuators, electronics, and sensors, to name a few.
Given Europe’s low labor mobility and slow permitting regimes, the opportunity to take over existing plants and staff for conversion represents a potential bonanza. For startups specializing in AI-powered drones and missile interceptors, the potential is enormous. Most begin near zero on industrial capacity. By taking over existing auto plants, they hurdle over several years of construction and gain a manufacturing foothold.
Three challenges could derail Europe’s ambitions.
Europe should be clear-eyed about what this conversion to defense production can achieve. The continent will not compete on frontier AI models against the US or China. Europe will not win the single-use hardware manufacturing race against China.
Defense companies will not become an engine of prosperity that compensate for the decline in the automotive industry, either. In Germany, eight large defense companies employ 70,000, while the country’s six car companies employ 500,000. That doesn’t even count suppliers, automotive sales, and service. Many weapons systems require capabilities where automotive expertise cannot contribute, such as guidance systems, rocket propulsion, warheads, and munitions production.
But the defense buildup offers a significant upside that could cushion the car industry’s decline — and bolster its defense independence. Because the Pentagon can cut off Western allies from the most capable AI and decide to disable US-manufactured systems for specific allied missions, Europe needs its own strong, AI-enabled unmanned systems manufacturing base.
Re-engineering excess automotive capacity will not only preserve thousands of highly skilled industrial jobs. It will increase the resilience of Europe’s democratic, open societies. The outcome of that battle will be decided as much in factories as in a battlefield.
Andreas Urbanski was Director AI Partnerships for Google Cloud and VP AI & Digital for Airbus Defence and Space. He is the founder of deepi.ai, a defense tech firm.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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