Kaunas: The European Court of Auditors published a review of EU defence policy on 3 September, and its central finding is uncomfortable for anyone selling the rearmament story. Despite ambitious plans and sharply higher national budgets, the auditors judge that fully improving preparedness by 2030 will be difficult, and that the Union will not be able to sustain high-intensity operations independently by that date.
The review covers 2020 to July 2026 and concentrates on financial management, governance and accountability rather than military capability as such. That focus produces the sharper observation. The auditors describe governance as complex and fragmented, with many actors holding partially overlapping responsibilities, and they warn that such structures make it hard to establish who answers for what when money is spent.
The mandate gap is the finding that should worry budget committees most. The Court states plainly that it still lacks authority to audit all the bodies and instruments now channelling defence spending. Instruments built outside the ordinary budget, including loan facilities and intergovernmental vehicles, sit partly beyond the reach of the Union’s own external auditor. Parliament’s budgetary control committee cannot scrutinise what nobody audits.
The Court draws on its own back catalogue to make the point about speed. Its 2023 report on defence research and its 2025 report on military mobility both concluded that politically driven spending, pushed through quickly and prioritised poorly, delivers uneven results. Applying that lesson to instruments designed in months under acute pressure is not a comfortable exercise.
None of this argues against spending more. The auditors acknowledge that new tools have been designed to plug genuine capability gaps and to give industry the long-term demand signal it has lacked. The argument is about plumbing. Money that flows through overlapping programmes with different reporting rules and different oversight bodies produces duplication, and duplication in procurement is expensive in a way that shows up years later.
Military mobility illustrates the problem neatly. Moving heavy equipment across the continent requires bridges, rail gauges, customs paperwork and national permissions, and responsibility for each element sits with a different authority. The Court audited that file in 2025 and found the governance too crowded to assign accountability cleanly.
Reviews carry no binding force. This one lands, though, as negotiators shape the next multiannual financial framework and decide how much defence money runs through the EU budget rather than around it. The auditors have supplied the argument for keeping it inside, where somebody can count it.
