Großwald

Three things to watch in European defence this quarter: 1 air-defence saturation and replenishment logic 2 the widening gap between sensor progress and sovereign upper-tier interception 3 whether Europe can turn urgency into standardisation rather than fragmented buying All three are visible already in radar, IAMD, and readiness reporting. This is where the next phase of rearmament gets decided: not in speeches, but in architecture, production, and interoperability. More at Großwald: https://www.grosswald.org/

The European munitions split with the United States became a registered company this week. KNDS and Elbit incorporated EuroPULS GmbH on 27 March �� 50:50, Kassel, ITAR-free, zero US content, 300 launchers in the framework. Rheinmetall signed an MoU with Spain's Indra to position GMARS where Madrid's own SILAM programme was cancelled. France is building a third architecture independently. MBDA's Thundart — fully ITAR-free — has demonstration firings scheduled mid-2026. Poland's Chunmoo track makes four. Four launcher programmes. Four ammunition families. Four fire control architectures. Three continents. None of them share a round with the US GMLRS stack that HIMARS operators in Ukraine and 20+ allied armies depend on. The question is whether the interoperability cost exceeds the cost of the alternative — which was not interoperability, but dependency. Germany asked for GMLRS compatibility for three years. It was refused. Poland asked for domestic GMLRS production. It was refused. France's launchers lost Lockheed maintenance support entirely. EuroPULS is not a detour from interoperability. It is what interoperability looks like when the partner who controls the munitions declines to share them. Full analysis in Großwald Curated No. 31 — Shrinking Euro, ITAR-free, ROE-Trap: https://lnkd.in/dEFsU3mB

NATO reported all 32 allies above 2% of GDP for the first time this week. Also this week: → BASF raised chemical prices 30% → Lanxess raised some materials 50% → Iran struck two of the world's largest aerospace-grade aluminium smelters → Italy's 10-year yield hit 4.14% — highest since mid-2024 → France nearly reached 3.9% — highest since 2009 The ETS emergency brake, the methane legislation freeze, and Qatar's force majeure on LNG all surfaced within 48 hours. Each was individually defensible. Together they are the first official admission that Europe cannot rearm, decarbonise, and absorb an energy shock simultaneously at current fiscal capacity. A 20% real increase in defence spending is substantial. Whether it can outpace the cost increase in the inputs that spending is supposed to buy is the open question. And there's a compounding problem: the energy crisis that raises European defence costs simultaneously increases Russian revenue. Moscow can spend its windfall at stable domestic input costs while European manufacturers absorb 30–50% feedstock increases. The purchasing power of a defence euro is falling as the spending line rises. Grosswald Curated No. 31: https://lnkd.in/dEFsU3mB

What happened over the Baltic on 25 March was not a single stray drone. It was an entire strike wave that transited NATO airspace — drone swarms crossing Estonia's maritime boundary multiple times, a warhead-carrying drone landing on Estonian soil, a detonation in Latvia, a crash in Lithuania. Estonia's defence commander stated explicitly why they could not engage: peacetime law limits available methods, and border geometry means debris could cross into Russia. These two constraints interact to create an asymmetric dead zone. Russian EW can push Ukrainian drones off course into NATO airspace, but NATO states along the border cannot shoot them down without risk of cross-border effects. Three Baltic states. Three incidents within 48 hours. Three different responses. No coordinated posture. Full assessment in Großwald Signal No. 25

40% of Russia's crude export capacity is now offline — roughly 2 million barrels per day. Three vectors converging simultaneously: Ukrainian drone strikes on all three major western export ports, the Druzhba pipeline shutdown since January, and European seizures of shadow-fleet tankers disrupting Arctic exports from Murmansk. Oil revenues fund roughly a quarter of the Russian state budget. With the Iran conflict simultaneously tightening global supply, Moscow cannot offset lost western export revenues through Asian routes — it lacks the infrastructure. More in Signal No. 25

Every NATO ally now meets the 2% defence spending threshold — for the first time in the Alliance's 77-year history. European and Canadian spending rose 20% in real terms over 2024. Germany overtook the UK as NATO's second-largest absolute spender for the first time since 2014. Poland is approaching 4.8%. The decades-long political fight over 2% is definitively closed. But clearing that baseline and scaling toward the 5% target agreed at The Hague require fundamentally different institutional mechanics: multi-year legal authorities, permanent budget lines, scaled production contracts, and expanded personnel pipelines. Until the rest of the alliance converts emergency budget injections into permanent architecture, the European defence industry lacks the contractual certainty to scale production to the volumes a 5% target demands. Full analysis in tonight's Großwald Signal 

If your work sits anywhere near ministries, programmes, primes, suppliers, or policy, this is the level at which European defence is now moving. Subscribe to receive the next Signal and weekly Briefing: https://lnkd.in/dK4jdJJg

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What does “European defence intelligence” actually mean in practice? For us, it means joining four things that are too often separated: - policy - procurement - industrial base - operational relevance A missile programme without industrial throughput is not readiness. An exercise without force-generation logic is theatre. A radar order without doctrine is only hardware. That integration is our editorial method. Read Großwald: https://www.grosswald.org/

A major investigation by DR - Danmarks Radio, Denmark's public broadcaster, establishes that Arctic Endurance — the multinational operation in Greenland tracked by Großwald since January — was an active defence operation against a potential US seizure. Politically coordinated with France, Germany, and the Nordic states since early 2025. The soldiers carried demolition charges for the runways at Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq, blood products from Danish blood banks, and KUP ammunition. Danish F-35s were armed live. The kongelig forsvarsordre contained no de-escalation clause. The original plan envisaged phased European deployment throughout 2026. The US military operation in Venezuela on 3 January 2026 compressed that timeline into days. Our analysis includes the force posture, the 2025 political origin, the multinational tripwire logic — and an honest assessment of whether the exercise/operation binary holds. https://lnkd.in/dh6_c2qh