Saying that “the world is changing” sounds trivial nowadays. But even five years ago it wasn’t so. War in Afghanistan seemed to be won and Russian military action in 2008 against Georgia was considered as “accident at work”. Yet the first symptoms of change were already there. The financial crisis on Wall Street, followed by a crisis in other western economies resulted eventually in the weakened position of the Western world and - in particular - the US. A growing wave of piracy in waters of the Arab sea, failed attempt to change the power in Syria that eventually caused a civil war in this country, and finally, Crimea annexation was mere but an outpost of wind of change. The history paced up. Today’s world is a dynamic, unstable environment, where old powers of the West are being challenged by local powers like Turkey or Iran. Local conflicts in the middle east and tensions on the South China Sea are the proxy wars of two big superpowers: the US and China. The smaller, third player - Russia - tries to gain as much as possible on this clash of titans, acting boldly in Syria, east Baltic Sea and northern boundaries of Scandinavia.
But have these events had an impact on the military in Europe? Many different experts prophesied in the last 20 years the end of traditional warfare. Info-war, hybrid war, cyber-war has been the terms tossed around in expert’s journals, articles, books and lectures as the future face of war. Although the new technologies had an enormous impact on the military, yet the geography, energetic means of warfare and physical presence of the soldiers, still play a decisive role in realizing political and economic objectives. The military incidents in January 2020 in Iraq and Libya, proves that above all doubts.
Finding an answer to the question above, can be determined by examining the military budgets and procurement patterns revealed in many open resources. The general view of the trends, can be driven from dataset prepared by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on the military spending of countries for the period 1949–2018. More in-depth analysis of European military market, requires grabbing the data on public tenders in this sector from EU resources. Thanks to The EU Directive 2009/81/EC on defense and sensitive security procurement, the official data on public tenders are available online on opentender.eu.
The following chart shows the trend in military spending of top 5 countries in Europe.
The unquestionable leader is France, with the expenses at the level of 60-70 billion of USD yearly. Second and third place is being held by the UK and Germany at around 50 billion USD. What is very interesting is, that the level of expenses seems to be uncorrelated to raising level of threats. It seems that unrest in the direct neighborhood of Europe have been noticed in 2015 when the bearish trend was reversed.