Imagine monitoring and assessing a doubling of the public education budget in the next five years but with a number of caveats:
- great uncertainty about the future of education, the content of school, college and university curriculums;
- a good third of education building contractors are located outside of Europe, mainly in the US;
- no union teachers, no NGOs to watch, a handful of independent education experts, and many other experts connected to government or to big contractors;
- no serious parliamentary oversight; and
- budget increase eating on the health budget.
This, very unlikely, scenario for education is happening across Europe in another key government function: defence policy.
Following a decades-long post-Cold War focus on peace dividends and asymmetric threats, the international landscape has undergone a paradigmatic shift marked by the resurgence of state-based conflicts, as seen in Ukraine. This has triggered a rapid and substantial rearmament effort, particularly in Europe, where nations are striving for greater strategic autonomy amid perceived U.S. unreliability.
The process faces dual challenges. Firstly, a change in scale poses significant political and industrial dilemmas. Politically, governments must navigate the zero-sum game of reallocating substantial resources from other priorities like health and education toward defence within tight fiscal constraints. Industrially, Europe’s rearmament is hampered by a fragmented, inefficient, and non-competitive defence industrial base, leading to costly duplication and dependence on non-EU suppliers.
Secondly, the changing military doctrine complicates procurement and armed forces planning. Strategic priorities have pivoted from expeditionary operations and stabilisation forces (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sahel) back to existential territorial defence on the continent. Simultaneously, the future of warfare is highly uncertain, blending traditional heavy weaponry with disruptive technologies like drones, forcing difficult trade-offs between sophistication and mass production. Regaining autonomous command, control, and strategic enabler capacities from the U.S. adds further complexity.
These dynamics make effective defence policy monitoring and assessment critically important yet exceptionally difficult. The sector is characterized by inherent obstacles: the complexity of policy and technology, a lack of transparency due to necessary but often excessive secrecy, and weaker public accountability mechanisms compared to other sectors. Performance is hard to measure, as core objectives like deterrence and prevention are intangible, and output criteria are elusive.
A comparative analysis with health and education policy underscores these unique difficulties. While the latter sectors rely on data-driven forecasts, robust output indicators, broad stakeholder engagement, and transparent governance, defence policy depends on scenario-based foresight, struggles with meaningful performance metrics, and operates within a centralized, opaque governance model with a narrow stakeholder base and limited civil society oversight. This combination heightens risks of inefficiency, misallocation of funds, and corruption.
As military expenditures rise to historic levels, the existing frameworks for democratic oversight and performance assessment are ill-equipped for the task. Strengthening parliamentary expertise, enhancing transparency where possible, and developing more mature evaluation frameworks are imperative to ensure that vast new defence expenditures are effective, efficient, and accountable.