From Industrial Base to Industrial Network: Rethinking European Strategic Autonomy

Robbin Laird’s account of how Ukraine and Asia’s engagement are rewiring European defense industry identifies something potentially larger than the European rearmament story itself. Read carefully, what he describes is not simply Europe spending more money faster, or Europe absorbing a wave of startups into its established primes. It is the early, uneven emergence of a different kind of industrial object altogether, one that no longer maps cleanly onto the vocabulary we have used since the Cold War to describe how states arm themselves.

For seventy years, the defense industrial base was conceived in essentially national terms. States sought to preserve sovereign production capacity, underwritten by national champions, national procurement systems, and international supply chains that were, for the most part, treated as stable background conditions rather than strategic variables in their own right.

Even the European project of defense cooperation, joint procurement programs, multinational consortia, EU funding instruments, remained largely an aggregation of national industrial bases rather than a genuine departure from the national logic underneath them. France built for France, with partners. Germany built for Germany, with partners. The partnerships multiplied but the underlying unit of analysis did not change.

What Laird’s analysis suggests, and what I want to draw out here, is that Ukraine’s war economy has begun to accelerate a different model, one in which the relevant unit of analysis is no longer the national base at all, but something closer to a networked defense industrial system.

The South Korean Case as Proof of Concept

South Korea is the clearest illustration, and it is worth being precise about why. The initial story is a familiar one: an outside supplier filling capability gaps at a speed European industry could not match, because European production lines were running at single-digit monthly rates when the war began and Warsaw needed tanks and howitzers now, not in five years. That is a conventional arms-export relationship, and if it had stopped there, it would not much disturb the old vocabulary. Korea would simply be a supplier, and Europe would be, as some critics have framed it, trading Russian-linked dependency for Korean dependency.

But that is not what has happened.

Hanwha is now building inside the European Union. Construction on the Hanwha Armoured Vehicle Centre of Excellence in Romania’s Dâmbovița County began in February 2026, Hanwha’s first production base on EU soil. Hyundai Rotem has reallocated its entire production line to the Polish contract while Poland’s own Bumar-Łabędy facility assembles K2PL tanks under technology transfer. Norway, Finland, and Estonia now operate K9 fleets that share spare parts and maintenance procedures with the Romanian and Polish lines.

Put simply: if a Korean company manufactures in Romania, transfers technology, employs European workers, connects its production to NATO logistics and sustainment networks, and adapts its systems to European operational requirements and customer-specific variants, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe that relationship simply as European dependence on a foreign supplier. It is something else, a production network with a Korean node, a Romanian node, a Polish node, and a set of Nordic sustainment nodes, all functioning as a single system regardless of where the corporate headquarters happens to sit.

This is the conceptual move I want to insist on. The relevant strategic question is no longer primarily where a company comes from. It is whether the production network as a whole can continue functioning under strategic stress, under sanctions, under a contested sea lane, under an adversary’s attempt to sever a single node.

That question changes what we mean by strategic autonomy.

Redefining Strategic Autonomy

Strategic autonomy has too often been understood, implicitly if not explicitly, as a synonym for industrial autarky: the capacity to build everything a state or a bloc might need, within its own borders, from its own raw materials, with its own labor. On that definition, autonomy is a scorecard of what percentage of a weapon system’s components originate inside the EU which is, not coincidentally, close to how the SAFE instrument’s 35-percent non-EU/EEA/Ukraine ceiling actually operates in practice. It is a reasonable proxy in a funding instrument. It is a poor definition of the underlying strategic concept.

No European country, and probably not Europe collectively, can realistically reproduce every critical technology, material, component, production line, and supply chain within its own borders on a timeline that matters. The European Parliament Research Service’s finding that the EU sources all of its heavy rare earths and 98 percent of its rare-earth magnets from China is not a temporary embarrassment to be engineered away in a five-year sprint.

It is closer to a structural fact about the current global division of industrial labor and treating it as a problem to be solved by autarky alone invites exactly the kind of magical thinking that has characterized too much of the European sovereignty debate since 2022.

Strategic autonomy should instead be understood as the capacity to preserve freedom of political and military action through control of a sufficiently diversified, redundant, resilient, and adaptable industrial network, control, not ownership; resilience, not self-sufficiency.

Under that definition, South Korea and Taiwan do not necessarily weaken European strategic autonomy at all. Under certain conditions they strengthen it, by creating alternative production capacity, technological options, redundancy, and supply-chain resilience that a purely national or purely European base could not generate on its own, and certainly not on the timeline the war has demanded. Taiwan’s drone-component exports to Poland and Czechia, growing, by one industry estimate, at 749 percent year-on-year, did not emerge because Europe decided on a diversification strategy in Brussels. They emerged because Beijing’s own tightening of drone-relevant exports pushed European buyers toward the alternative Taiwan had already built.

The dependency did not disappear. It relocated to a partner whose interests in a contested supply relationship with China run parallel to Europe’s own.

China illustrates the opposite pole of the same phenomenon, and illustrates why the network concept matters more, not less, once an adversary is actively trying to weaponize it. European dependence on Chinese rare earths, magnets, and drone components demonstrates that supply chains are no longer merely economic infrastructure to be optimized for cost and reliability.

They have become instruments of strategic power, in the same category as basing rights or intelligence-sharing arrangements. Beijing’s July 2026 retaliatory ban on dual-use exports to Rheinmetall, Vigo Photonics, and Tatra was a small gesture in absolute terms, but it was a precise demonstration of leverage: an adversary reaching into a specific node of a specific network and testing what happens when that node is denied.

The industrial supply chain itself is becoming part of the battlespace. A production bottleneck, an export restriction, the denial of a critical component, or control over a technological chokepoint can generate operational effects without a single factory ever being physically attacked.

What North Korea Has Taught Europe, Inadvertently

If South Korea demonstrates the positive case for a networked industrial system, North Korea demonstrates, from the adversary’s side, what a committed industrial mobilization looks like when a coalition — however sanctioned, however isolated — decides that sustaining a prolonged war matters more than anything else.

Pyongyang’s significance to this story is not simply that it supplies Russia with ammunition, though the scale is striking: South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence assessments now put North Korean supplies at roughly half of Russia’s frontline ammunition needs, and South Korea’s own Defense Intelligence Agency has assessed more than 12 million rounds of 152mm ammunition alone, moved through a logistics relationship a UN monitoring team estimated at more than 20,000 shipping containers since September 2023.

The deeper significance is that North Korea has helped establish the industrial benchmark against which European planners must now measure their own ability to sustain a prolonged conflict. Russia’s ability to sustain roughly 10,000 artillery shells fired per day, five times Ukraine’s rate through much of the war, has been substantially a function of North Korean resupply, not Russian domestic output alone.

That is an uncomfortable lesson, but a strategically necessary one: technological superiority does not eliminate the requirement for mass when warfare becomes prolonged and attritional. Ukraine has demonstrated the value of rapid innovation and intelligent mass, the drone ecosystem that grew from fewer than ten companies in 2022 to roughly 1,500 by 2025 is itself a network story, not a national-champion story. North Korea has demonstrated something different but complementary: the strategic value of industrial mass that can be sustained over time, even by an economy under comprehensive sanctions.

Taken together, these two demonstrations point toward the same conclusion from opposite directions. Deterrence itself increasingly possesses an industrial dimension, and that dimension can no longer be assessed by counting hardware in inventory on any given day.

Mass, Sustained

A credible military force is not simply the force available on the first day of a war. It is the force that can still be resupplied, repaired, replaced, and reinforced on the three-hundredth day, and the network not the national base is now the unit that determines whether that is possible.

This is, I think, the real significance of what Laird has documented: not that Europe is spending more, though it is, and not that startups are being absorbed by primes faster than they are displacing them, though the Bruegel findings on procurement concentration confirm that they are.

It is that the war has forced into visibility a structural shift that was already underway in global defense production before 2022, and that Europe’s institutions, built for an era in which the national industrial base was the natural and sufficient unit of strategic planning, are only now beginning to catch up to.

The test of European strategic autonomy over the next decade will not be the percentage of components sourced inside the EU-27.

It will be whether the networks Europe has built with Korea in Romania, with Taiwan in component supply, with Ukraine as co-designer rather than aid recipient can continue to function when an adversary tries deliberately to break them.

On the evidence of the past three years, that is a test Europe is still learning how to take.

Two Wars, One Industrial Base: How Ukraine and Asia’s Engagement Are Rewiring European Defense