Op-ed: Europe’s defence blind spot

Command-and-control systems turn capabilities into power

In many ways, Europe is finally catching up on defence. New “neo‑primes” are shipping drones at scale, cyber and EW stacks are hardening, and money is flowing into long‑range fires and space‑based sensing. From a distance, it is easy to conclude that the problem is being solved.

But an important element is missing. Even large, advanced forces can be defeated if their assets are not knitted together by an effective command-and-control (C2) layer – particularly in a hybrid conflict where civilian and military responsibilities overlap. Brilliant but isolated systems can be probed, learned and bypassed one by one.

Until now it has fallen to US commanders to unify Europe’s capable but fragmented forces within NATO. If the C2 layer, data standards and targeting architectures remain predominantly American, even record European budgets and a booming defence‑tech scene will be over-reliant on US decision chains at the moment of crisis.​

On paper, Europe is rearming, digitising and hardening its infrastructure at speed. In practice, it still organises for peace‑time silos. Threats are managed as if military, cyber, energy and borders were separate theatres, instead of facets of one continuous battlespace.

Adversaries are already probing the gaps. When unidentified drones flew over Belgium’s Doel nuclear plant and nearby critical sites in 2025, airspace control and the operator could see parts of the picture, but energy regulators and local police lacked a shared, real‑time view and common playbook. When drone incursions shut or disrupted Scandinavian airports the same year, military, air traffic control and law enforcement struggled to share feeds fast enough to agree on intercepts before flights had to be suspended.

Similar coordination gaps show up in hybrid incidents against rail and energy infrastructure, where cyber teams see signatures but transport operators, police and militaries lack the legal and technical pathways to treat it as one campaign. The problem is no longer a lack of sensors or tools, but a lack political, legal and technical mechanisms to stitch them into a single response under stress.

New stacks, old silos

Europe’s emerging neo‑primes are, in many ways, exactly what policymakers asked for: companies that ship useful capability on wartime timelines instead of peacetime ones. They integrate sensors, autonomy, effectors and data services with a speed that traditional primes struggle to match, and they are already on the Ukrainian frontline, iterating against the hardest possible user feedback.

But if each ministry, service or country buys these capabilities into its own vertical command stack, Europe risks building an archipelago of power: islands of excellence, separated by institutional water.

The technical standards matter, but what really counts is whether intent, data and effects can move across ministries, services and borders at the speed of a Russian hybrid campaign. That requires not just interoperability at the interface level, but political agreements about who can see what, who can decide what, and how responsibility is shared when sensors, shooters and operators sit in different jurisdictions.​

The answer is not “one more platform”, but rather a different organising principle. Europe needs to treat C2 as the primary strategic asset: a sovereign, software‑driven layer that horizontally connects forces, agencies and infrastructures, instead of stacking yet another vertical system on top of existing silos.

In practice, that means a C2 core that ingests data from legacy platforms and new drones alike, represents legal and political constraints as code, and exposes tailored views to militaries, homeland security, energy operators and law enforcement within a single, shared architecture. Nexus C2, a platform built by my employer Intelic, works across units and organisations to create a common operational picture and unified tasking chain for systems and effectors. This horizontal integration is what turns many small capabilities into one coherent instrument of power.

Mechanisms of power

If Europe builds this kind of sovereign, horizontally integrated command backbone, it can turn the current wave of spending and innovation into real power. If not, its capabilities will remain fragmented and it will risk being defeated even by a smaller adversary.

Europe now has a critical mass of talent, startups and emerging neo‑primes delivering sensors, effectors, software and drones at high speed to the front line. But transforming this into war-fighting power will require more than shared standards and APIs. Data, intent, and effects must flow seamlessly across services, domains, and borders so that small innovations compound into credible deterrence.

The question is shifting from who builds the best drone to who organises the ecosystem most effectively; countries that take interoperability seriously must decide how they structure their industries, not just which systems they buy.

A combat‑grade, platform‑agnostic C2 layer is the mechanism that turns neo‑prime diversity into strategic coherence, where heterogeneous feeds are fused into a common operating picture and where different actors can coordinate decisions and effects without rebuilding their stack each time.

Alexandre Almeida is a business developer at Intelic.