For the first time since NATO was founded in 1949, European members of the alliance spent more on military procurement than the United States when the numbers are adjusted for purchasing power. The milestone, reflected in data published by the European Defence Agency in early 2025, reflects a 39% year-over-year jump in EU procurement expenditure, which hit 88 billion euros in 2024 at constant prices. Much of that new money is flowing toward unmanned systems, as governments from Warsaw to Berlin absorb hard lessons from the skies over Ukraine.
A spending surge with no recent precedent
The scale of the increase is difficult to overstate. As recently as 2020, EU member states collectively spent roughly 40 billion euros on equipment procurement. By 2024, that figure had more than doubled. The European Defence Agency’s full accounting, published as Defence Data 2024-2025 by the Publications Office of the European Union, projects procurement will exceed 100 billion euros in 2025, a pace of military buying not seen on the continent since the Cold War.
The comparison with the United States relies on purchasing power parity, or PPP, a standard economic tool that accounts for the fact that a euro spent in Poland or Greece buys more labor and raw materials than a dollar spent in Virginia. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute maintains the most widely used Military Expenditure Database, covering global defense budgets from 1949 through 2025. When SIPRI researchers apply PPP adjustments to the combined European procurement figures against U.S. Department of Defense procurement accounts, the European total now matches or edges past the American one. The exact margin varies depending on which deflator and exchange-rate assumptions are used, but the direction of the shift is consistent across methodologies.
That reversal carries political weight. For years, American presidents from both parties have pressed European allies to spend more on defense, pointing to the NATO guideline that members devote at least 2% of GDP to their militaries. As of 2024, 23 of NATO’s 32 members met or exceeded that threshold, up from just three in 2014. The procurement data suggests the spending is increasingly going toward actual hardware rather than personnel costs, which historically consumed the bulk of European defense budgets.
Drones at the center of the buying spree
No single EDA table breaks out drone spending from the 88 billion euro procurement total. But a review of national budget documents and defense ministry announcements across the continent makes clear that unmanned systems are absorbing a disproportionate share of new funds.
Poland offers the starkest example. Warsaw has committed tens of billions of zloty to unmanned aerial systems as part of its broader Shield of the East modernization program, which aims to fortify the country’s border with Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Polish forces already operate Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones and domestically produced loitering munitions from WB Electronics, and the government has signaled plans to scale up production and procurement of both categories through 2026.
Germany, long criticized for underinvesting in defense, has moved to expand its drone pipeline as well. Berlin is a lead partner in the Eurodrone program, a medium-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft being developed by Airbus for Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. The program passed key development milestones in 2024, and Germany has continued operating leased Israeli-made Heron TP drones for surveillance missions in the interim.
Smaller allies are also spending aggressively. The Baltic states, Denmark, and the Netherlands have all announced new unmanned systems contracts since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The pattern is consistent: governments watched Ukrainian forces use relatively cheap drones to destroy Russian armor worth orders of magnitude more, and they moved to build or buy similar capabilities.
Why the comparison with the U.S. is complicated
The headline finding, that European allies outspent the U.S. in procurement purchasing power, deserves a note of caution. The U.S. Department of Defense does not publish a single, easily comparable PPP-adjusted procurement figure alongside the EDA’s European totals. The comparison requires applying conversions to data from SIPRI, the EDA, and U.S. budget documents. Different modeling choices, particularly around how to value labor costs in defense manufacturing, can shift the result by several percentage points.
What is not in dispute is the trajectory. Europe’s procurement spending rose 39% in a single year. American procurement budgets, while still enormous in absolute dollar terms, grew at a far slower rate over the same period. Even cautious readings of the PPP crossover point acknowledge that the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic has narrowed dramatically.
There is also a structural difference worth noting. A large share of U.S. procurement spending goes toward power-projection platforms like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and long-range bombers that have no European equivalent. European procurement is weighted more heavily toward land-based systems, air defense, and, increasingly, drones. The two spending profiles serve different strategic purposes, which means a raw dollar-for-dollar comparison, even adjusted for purchasing power, does not capture the full picture of military capability.
Whether the momentum holds past 2026
European defense budgets have a history of surging after crises and then flattening once the immediate threat fades. The question hanging over the current buildup is whether it will follow the same pattern or represent a lasting structural shift.
Several factors suggest this time may be different. Russia’s war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending quickly, and the threat it poses to NATO’s eastern flank remains the alliance’s primary planning concern. Political consensus in favor of higher defense spending has solidified across most of Europe, including in traditionally cautious countries like Germany, which amended its constitution in 2022 to create a 100 billion euro special fund for the Bundeswehr. And the possibility that the United States may reduce its security commitments to Europe, a recurring theme in American politics since at least 2017, has given European leaders additional motivation to invest in their own capabilities.
But fiscal pressures are real. Many EU member states are running deficits that bump against the bloc’s fiscal rules, and defense competes with healthcare, pensions, and climate spending for limited budgetary space. The EDA’s projection of 100 billion euros in 2025 procurement spending assumes current political commitments hold through the budget cycle. If economic conditions deteriorate or political priorities shift, that number could come in lower.
For now, the 2024 data marks a genuine inflection point. Europe is buying military equipment at a rate that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and drones sit at the leading edge of that transformation. How long the momentum lasts will depend on decisions that have not yet been made in capitals from Berlin to Bucharest. But the spending has already reshaped the burden-sharing math that has defined NATO debates for a generation.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
