Spain enters 2026 with a defense debate more visible than substantial: headlines abound and quality is scarce. The European continent is more unstable, strategic competition has sharpened, the transatlantic bond has eroded and the war in Ukraine has raised the NATO and EU threshold expectations. Spain’s response, however, tends to follow a familiar pattern: accelerating what already existed. More money is spent, more programs are signed, extraordinary instruments are mobilized, and the effort is wrapped in an industrial narrative. All of this is necessary. The problem is that this acceleration rests on a structural deficiency: a strategic culture that prevents a serious debate about defense matters.
“We observe a serious lack of intellectual muscle when it comes to strategic thought about defense. And these circumstances critically affect, among other things, the discussion around military spending and security spending”
We can identify some elements of this problem thanks to the results of the project Rethinking the Role of the Spanish Armed Forces in the Face of New Security Challenges (REPENFAS) —for which political, military, and defense industry elites were interviewed, as well as the organization of separate expert security and defense seminars—, not with the aim of exhausting the subject: the general prioritization by political elites of social issues (salaries, career paths for troops and sailors, etc.) over the modernization of equipment by military officers and corporate managers; a strongly top-down political agenda; threat perceptions that differ greatly among elites; or strong institutional inertia toward the status quo. Likewise, we observe a serious lack of intellectual muscle on defense strategic thinking. And these circumstances critically affect, among other things, the discussion around military and security spending.
The underlying problem is not the 2% itself. It is believing that the percentage equals strategy. An input indicator can help compare efforts, but it does not define what forces we need. Defense requires linking ends (ends), ways (ways), and feasible, sustainable means (means). Only from that strategic triad does the design of the force and its catalog of capabilities derive: what we want to be able to do, in what scenarios, with what levels of conscription and what trade-offs we are prepared to accept. When those questions aren’t answered, the system tends to substitute strategy with two languages: the accounting language (percentages) and the industrial language (returns). Both matter, but neither governs, by itself, a credible defense. Moreover, in Spain there is an added emphasis on social return, turning defense into a priority vector of employment, cohesion, and regional dynamism.
Politics explains part of this drift. The pressure to raise the defense effort has been articulated around a very concrete external schedule, with the Hague Summit last June as a focal point: it was necessary to reach the 2% threshold. The path to that milestone reinforced incentives to accelerate spending, and the year ended under a logic of year-end consolidation. The Industrial and Technological Plan for Security and Defense, presented in April, condensed the approach: an additional €10.471 billion to accelerate the leap to 2% in 2025. The political framing was part of the solution: without raising taxes and without touching social spending. In addition, there is a silent constraint: budgetary extensions narrow the ordinary path to reallocate items. The result is that the discussion centers more on the “how” to reach the target than on the “why” to sustain it year after year.
This approach makes political sense, but it carries strategic costs. When the priority is to close the figure quickly, the natural incentive is to focus on the visible and the measurable: large programs, announcements, calendars, and industrial returns. Programs that dominate the procurement system, capturing many resources, and where the end-user is not taken into account, in the view of a broad swath of military and business elites. The problem is that defense is decided elsewhere: in availability, sustainment, training, personnel, ammunition, infrastructure, or resilience.
Strategic Defense Review: Capabilities, Industry, and Priorities for 2040
Hence the importance of a strategic review. Not a declarative document, but an exercise like the one conducted in 2003 that would set a force model with a 2040 horizon and, from it, guide transformative long-term planning: which capabilities go first, which can wait, and what renunciations are accepted. Without that compass, modernization tends to follow the logic of the window of opportunity: the portfolio expands and the “firmable” is accelerated. The result may be a force that is more modern in its catalog, but built by aggregation rather than by design. During the expert seminars in the REPENFAS project, the demand and desirability of carrying out this planning task was shared across all participants, establishing clear consensus.
“When the industrial calendar is in motion, re-prioritizing becomes politically costly, even if risks change or preparation gaps appear”
It is worth clarifying a point that the public debate oversimplifies: a program is not a military capability. A capability is a slow and demanding architecture that combines organization, doctrine, personnel, training, infrastructure, interoperability, and sustainment. The hardware is the most visible component, but it is rarely decisive by itself. That is why it is so easy to confuse “contracting” with “being prepared.” The capability matures at the pace of system integration, career profiles, doctrine development, and the recruitment and retention of personnel. In an accelerated cycle, bottlenecks appear where they are least visible: in the program office, in the supply chain, or in the real availability of personnel and maintenance.
To that gap is added the financial “plumbing” that allows accelerating the modernization cycle. A substantial portion of the effort rests on multi-year commitments: useful for complex programs, but tempting to showcase volume without clarifying the cost of funding and sustaining it. In that framework, deferred payments with industrial advances allow starting programs without bearing the entire upfront cost in the Defense budget. In practice, the state advances funding for R&D and shifts part of the cash burden to later years, when deliveries arrive. This is not irregular: it is a cash-flow management technique. But it has strategic effects: it shifts attention away from the life cycle and sustainment toward program activation and creates inertia. When the industrial calendar is in motion, re-prioritizing becomes politically costly, even if risks change or preparation gaps appear.
The need for a strategic review becomes more evident when we look at the “southern flank.” Although the allied approach is 360°, the center of gravity in Europe lies to the east; Spain, however, coexists with a threat not shared by the rest of our allies. Again drawing on REPENFAS data, this perception was clearly followed by a majority of experts and elites—though it was more debated among political elites, signaling another worrying gap—; if the concept is opened to threats from “the south,” the consensus on this matter is even broader. Recognizing it does not mean dramatizing, but ordering. If that horizon is part of the plausible scenario —and two-thirds of the experts placed it in the 2035 scenario—, investment decisions must align with clear force objectives: to maximize the return in usable military power for two simultaneous demands, contributing to NATO and deterring in the immediate environment.
“The weaker the strategic culture in the terms described, the easier it is for defense policy to be managed by impulses, not by design”
Here comes a realpolitik element worth naming without caricature: the “iron triangle” of bureaucrats, politicians, and industry. It is the logic of procurement governance. That mediation is inevitable, but it introduces a structural bias: it tends to reward what is executable, what can be industrialized, and what is politically marketable, while relegating what does not shine — such as sustainment, ammunition, personnel, or training — even though those elements determine real availability. That is why the rule of hierarchy must be explicit: industry is a means; military utility is the end.
The weaker the strategic culture is in the terms explained, the more likely defense policy is to be driven by impulses rather than by design. The answer is not to slow modernization nor to deny the industrial dimension. In the current context, strengthening the industrial base and technological autonomy is necessary. If experts consulted converged on one point, it was that the industrial landscape is undergoing profound transformations, which means we face systemic pressure. The solution is to govern the effort with an explicit compass: a strategic defense review that fulfills three functions. First, diagnosis and scenarios: which risks do we prioritize and which contingencies do we consider plausible, without confusing desire with probability. Second, force model: what do we want to be able to do and with what catalog of capabilities, distinguishing between essential and desirable. Third, renunciations and opportunity costs: what we will not do, what gaps we accept as risk, and which preparation funds we protect even if they are not visible.
To contextualize some of the possible trade-offs with several REPENFAS data points: about 50% of experts thought it would not be possible, by 2035, to reconcile preparing the armed forces for international peacekeeping and stabilization missions with deterrence and defense against high-intensity conflicts; nearly 40% were skeptical about the possible articulation of a “grand strategy”; more than 90% converged on accepting the probability of losing sovereignty and industrial autonomy; while 80% of experts favored multi-year defense budgets — where alignment with the majority of interviewees was also evident.
Changes in strategic culture occur gradually. Consequently, all these shifts in the security environment are interpreted from a strategic culture that responded to that triad without perceiving military threats, overlooking the discussion on the use of armed force as an instrument of defense and foreign policy, and underscoring spending commitments as a purely political pledge.
Therefore, although 2% may be a useful threshold, the decisive question is different: whether, five or ten years from now, this effort will have produced a force that is more available, sustainable, and coherent with our risk and threat landscape and with the role we wish to play in the world. For that, a more mature strategic culture is required. Without it, we will continue to modernize a great deal, without a clear sense of what for.
