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<\/p>\nThis very week, Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez stated that Spain is ready to move towards a European army and described the Security and Defence Union as a \u201cEuropean public good\u201d. It is a politically powerful statement, and one that captures the mood of the moment well: Europe can no longer keep talking about security as if it were still living in the old strategic environment. But for that very reason, it is worth asking a less epic and more decisive question: even if the political will existed, is Europe actually in a position to sustain a common Defence in terms of deployment, transit, support and coordination?<\/p>\n
The answer forces us to come down to the material level. Because a Common Defence does not begin when it is proclaimed; it begins when it can move. When troops, equipment, ammunition, spare parts, fuel, data, permits and logistical support can move across Europe with speed, predictability and security. And this is where one of the great reality tests of the European Defence project appears: military mobility. The European Commission itself places it among the seven priority capability areas within the Readiness 2030 framework and defines it as a European network of land corridors, airports, ports and enabling assets capable of sustaining the rapid movement of forces and materiel.<\/p>\n
For years, military mobility was seen as a technical, almost bureaucratic issue: diplomatic clearances, railway gauges, bridge load limits, customs procedures, document interoperability. All of that remains true, but it is no longer enough to explain the scale of the problem. The war in Ukraine has reminded us that logistics is not an appendix to strategy: it is one of its enabling conditions. And the deterioration of Europe\u2019s security environment has made visible something that was underestimated for far too long: Europe may accumulate capabilities, but if it cannot activate and move them at the pace required by a crisis, its credibility as a security actor will inevitably remain limited. Nothing new, really. One of the classic maxims of military strategy says it plainly: battles are won by infantry, but wars are won by logistics.<\/p>\n
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In this context, the first major obstacle Europe faces is fragmentation. Not only industrial or doctrinal fragmentation, but regulatory and procedural fragmentation as well. The European Commission has been especially clear on this point: cross-border rules and procedures remain fragmented, slow and poorly harmonised; the lack of convergence in permits, documentation and emergency procedures, combined with insufficient digitalisation, increases response times and weakens the EU\u2019s capacity for rapid deployment. Brussels\u2019 conclusion is, in some ways, even more relevant than the technical diagnosis itself: this framework reduces preparedness, deterrence and Europe\u2019s credibility as a security actor.<\/p>\n
The second major problem is physical. Europe has moved forward, but it is still far from where it needs to be. Since 2021, around \u20ac 1.7 billion has been allocated through the Connecting Europe Facility to 95 dual-use infrastructure projects across 21 Member States. That is an important step, but the Commission itself acknowledges that it is not enough: in 2025, the Council adopted four priority multimodal corridors to facilitate large-scale military movements and, at the same time, the EU identified around 500 \u201chotspot\u201d projects requiring roughly \u20ac 100 billion in investment to remove bottlenecks along those corridors. The gap between what has already been funded and what is actually needed captures the scale of the challenge rather well.<\/p>\n
That is why the new European military mobility package is not a footnote, but a first-order political signal. What Brussels is proposing for 2025\u20132034 is not simply more investment; it is a change in scale and logic: accelerated procedures, a system based on notification rather than individual permits, a proposed \u20ac 17.65 billion in the next Connecting Europe Facility, a resilience tool to identify, adapt and protect strategic infrastructure, a shared reserve of transport and logistics capabilities, national military transport coordinators, and a single digital information system for military mobility. In other words, the EU has understood that mobility can no longer continue to rely on partial arrangements and improvised solutions.<\/p>\n
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This is where the truly strategic dimension of the issue lies. Military mobility is not merely a logistical problem; it is a very concrete expression of what, at The Grey, we have been describing as\u00a0Extended Defence<\/strong>. To talk about mobility is to talk about ports, airports, railways, roads, Ro-Ro platforms, heavy transport, storage, maintenance, energy, cybersecurity, digitalisation, critical infrastructure protection, planning software and public-private coordination. In other words, this is not a sectoral agenda, but a conversation that brings together Defence, industry, infrastructure, technology and economic security within the same architecture of power. Not to mention other key networks such as supply and healthcare systems, among others.<\/p>\n And this is where the opportunity appears. Because European military mobility does not only require a larger Defence budget; it also demands greater industrial capacity, more engineering, more digitalisation and more operators capable of working in dual-use environments. For many Spanish and European companies, this is not a distant debate reserved for the major traditional contractors. The agenda now opening up extends to infrastructure managers, logistics operators, civil engineering firms, technology companies, cybersecurity, command-and-control systems, maintenance, critical node protection, strategic air transport and data solutions applied to the coordination of complex flows. When Brussels speaks of strategic infrastructure, shared transport and logistics capabilities, or a single digital information system, it is also describing a new European economic and technological space. That is European Defence, and it is essential if Europe is to have a truly capable and active European army.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In Spain\u2019s case, this conversation also has a specific dimension of its own. The National Security Strategy defines Spain as a country with a European, Mediterranean and Atlantic condition; and the 2024 National Maritime Security Strategy starts from an equally forceful idea: Spain is a maritime nation and must protect its interests \u201cat sea\u201d and \u201cfrom the sea\u201d. Added to this is the approval in 2025 of the new National Aerospace Security Strategy, a sign that the air and space domain has become a central part of national security.<\/p>\n If that threefold framework \u2014European, maritime and aerospace\u2014 is taken seriously, the strategic conclusion is fairly clear: Spain should not think of its contribution to European Defence as a replication of Central European models of land power, but rather as the consolidation of an aeronaval power<\/strong> capable of connecting corridors, sustaining projection, securing logistical nodes and providing strategic depth between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. This is an analytical reading, but it is fully aligned with geography and with the State\u2019s own strategic documents.<\/p>\n That has practical consequences. Spain\u2019s location, its ports, its airport network, its link between maritime fa\u00e7ades, its proximity to North Africa and its role as a hinge between Europe, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean give it singular value within a military mobility agenda that will become increasingly aeronaval and multimodal. If Europe wants to reduce deployment times, strengthen its strategic corridors and build dual-use resilience, Spain should not limit itself to asking for a place in the conversation: it should aspire to help organise part of it. And that requires political vision, European coordination and a far more ambitious industrial reading of what security means today.<\/p>\n The debate on a European army will remain important and, most likely, inevitable. But it risks once again remaining little more than a political declaration if it is not accompanied by more concrete questions: how Europe moves, under what rules, across which infrastructures, with what logistical capabilities, with which digital systems and with what industrial base. Military mobility is, in that sense, the reality test of common Defence. It is the line that separates political ambition from effective strategic capability.<\/p>\n At the end of the day, Europe can continue debating the final architecture of its Defence. But if it wants to do so seriously, it will first have to solve something far more decisive: its ability to move power. And for Spain, that challenge is also an opportunity. The opportunity to position itself not only as a participant in the new European Defence, but as one of the countries that can help make it operational, industrially solid and strategically credible.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Images: \u00a9 European Union \/ European Commission. Source: ec.europa.eu<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This very week, Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez stated that Spain is ready to move towards a European army and described the Security and Defence Union as a \u201cEuropean public good\u201d. It is a politically powerful statement, and one that captures the mood of the moment well: Europe can no longer keep talking about security […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1774,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sin-categorizar"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSpain and its aeronaval potential<\/h2>\n