Europe should aim to source 70% of its defence procurement from European industry, Micael Johansson, CEO of Saab and chair of the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries in Europe, said Tuesday at the ASD Convention 2026 in Cascais — a target that would represent a fundamental shift in how NATO’s European members buy military equipment.
The framing is deliberate. The US procures 98% of its defence needs domestically. Johansson’s 70/30 split would still leave significant room for transatlantic cooperation while rebalancing an industrial base that has spent decades relying on American platforms.
Why Demand Coalitions, Not Top-Down Mandates
Johansson was direct about what he thinks won’t work: politically orchestrated industrial specialization where Brussels assigns each country a weapons category. “I don’t believe in that,” he said. What he does believe in is demand alignment — groups of countries agreeing to buy the same things, creating volumes large enough to justify joint ventures and, eventually, consolidation.
The logic is sound. European defence fragmentation is fundamentally a demand problem. Customized national variants of the same platform destroy the economies of scale that make industrial investment viable. If Germany, Poland, and France each specify different versions of a drone system, no manufacturer can build the production volume needed to compete with US or Chinese equivalents.
The proposed EU “drone wall” — a continental air defence network — is one area where Johansson sees mandatory collaboration. Air defence systems and long-range precision strike capabilities are explicitly beyond what any single European country can develop or sustain alone.
NATO Interoperability Without US Equipment Dependency
On the tension between European preference and NATO commitments, Johansson drew a distinction that matters for procurement decisions: interoperability does not require buying American. “Everyone has to bring in things that work together. I don’t think that is a problem at all.” The current US administration’s push for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own defence actually reinforces the European preference argument rather than contradicting it.
NATO’s new 3.5% GDP spending target by 2035 — endorsed by 32 members, with what Johansson described as “maybe one exception” — means European defence budgets are expanding regardless. The question is whether that money flows to European industry or continues to fund US prime contractors.
Supply chain resilience is the other constraint Johansson flagged. Raw materials and rare earth minerals — currently concentrated in China — represent a structural vulnerability that European defence industrial ambition cannot solve through procurement policy alone. Regionalizing supply chains is a long-term project that runs parallel to, not in sequence with, the demand coalition strategy.
The ASD Convention brought together the major European defence, security, and aerospace primes. Johansson’s 70% target will become a reference point in procurement debates as EU member states finalize their rearmament budgets through 2026.
