To build strategic autonomy, Europe needs to wean itself off foreign technology, By Robert Brull

France’s trial of the AI-powered Arcadia battlefield command system points to a wider European defence challenge: strategic autonomy will depend not only on higher military spending, but on control over the technologies, intellectual property and decision-making systems that underpin modern warfare.

The U.S. military AI system Maven, now closely associated with Palantir, turns raw battlefield data into usable insights. In short, it pulls together drone footage, satellite imagery, sensor feeds, and intelligence reports, then uses software to spot patterns and identify possible targets so that commanders can act more quickly. What is so valuable about Maven is its ability to crunch the raw data at speed: to draw the most important insight from a sea of information in a way that a human being could not do promptly, or alone. Maven brings AI close to the heart of military decision-making. It isn’t surprising that it comes from the U.S..

It makes the news that the French government has chosen to trial Arcadia, a Maven-like battlefield command system built by French companies, significant. It shows that the countries of Europe are no longer willing to rely in the way they once did on American technology. After decades spent under the American security umbrella, Europe is finally seeing that the umbrella might not be there for good, and that if it is to stand on its own two feet, and to be a partner of its American friends, rather than a dependent, then it must start developing its own, home-grown, technology. The shutdown of Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models is further proof of that.

This is not just a matter of who builds military equipment, but who controls it, and the various components that comprise it. Many military systems include parts that can be manipulated remotely – can be disabled, withheld, restricted, or otherwise made difficult to use. Even if the companies who have this power are from allied countries, such systems must still be said to be vulnerable. We – Europe – simply can’t call ourselves sovereign if someone else can turn off the lights whenever they want. Indeed, this is a basic principle of the modern technology supply chain: whoever owns the code, the architecture or the encryption keys owns the system.

Among other reasons, this is why for all the welcome promises made by European governments to boost defence spending, money alone won’t cut it. So long as we rely on foreign technology, there exists a structural asymmetry between ourselves and our friends on the other side of the Atlantic. We need only think about Iran or Greenland to say the ways that even old friends can disagree on geopolitics and military action. Europe has to be able to provide its own deterrent, its own forms of support, and, if needed, its own military forces and technology should a major conflict erupt in its territory. Ideally, it would be able to buy allied technology with the keys in the ignition – in other words, to purchase items from US companies who would be compelled to manufacture, store and maintain those items locally if they want to do business. But at present, that doesn’t look likely.

Actually achieving autonomy is more complicated than it looks. Europe is hamstrung by an old-fashioned take on procurement that is taking painfully slow to reform. Startups developing the technology of tomorrow, and doing so at speed, particularly dual-use or space companies, are frequently overlooked – despite the centrality of speed and innovation in war, as our friends in Ukraine have shown. There is fragmentation and duplication on the continent, whereby major countries spend their own money on building their own technology, rather than share costs, avoid duplication, and scale production together. And there is a lack of standardisation, which undermines interoperability and makes it harder for smaller players to join the European market.

This is changing, but it can’t change soon enough. I myself have spent a great deal of time in Ukraine, in Poland, and in Lithuania – three countries for which the threat of war is far from theoretical. Ukraine, of course, has been at war for some time; but in Lithuania, morbid rumours abound – a sign, whether the rumours are true or not, that there are serious fears of invasion in the coming years. Local strategists fear that Russia might only invade a small area under the pretext of easing local tensions so that NATO doesn’t respond. This could break the alliance quickly. We need a strong, sovereign deterrent urgently if we are to make even a ‘small’ attack look risky. If the European NATO countries, perhaps with support from Canada and Japan, want to develop Europe’s eastern flank without American help, then a radical transformation in how we think about war is necessary. A major part of that is dependence on foreign tech.

And there is no reason why in fact we can’t learn from the American approach to defence. The existence of the Defence Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as the quality of the innovation pipeline linking the Pentagon to venture capital and tech companies big and small, represents a blueprint that Europe could – and I would argue should – follow. The American defence system is so mature that moving from Europe to the United States and setting up there is a temptation for some of Europe’s best talent.

That France is developing Arcadia is good news. But the rest of Europe, if this does indeed reveal a certain realism with respect to its role in the world and the challenges it faces, must now back France’s approach and integrate it in the wider system. Arcadia should be a model for how breakthrough technologies are established continent-wide. This is vitally necessary if Europe is to be able to achieve the goal that it has pursued, and that has eluded it, for so long: strategic autonomy.