The industrial and procurement fundation - Building the Arsenal That Collective Defence Requires

Curated by Robin Ashby

May - July 2026

This paper — the fourth and final in the Unleashing the Paper Tiger series — addresses the industrial and procurement foundation without which the institutional architecture of Paper II and the capabilities of Paper III cannot be built or sustained. It draws directly on the Eurodefense Working Group 18-30's 2023 analysis of European defence procurement from UK perspectives, extending that work into the broader architecture that Article 42.7 requires. Papers I, II, and III established the strategic case, the institutional architecture, and the capability layers respectively.

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Capabilities - Missiles, Drones, Space, Sanctions and the Neutrals

Curated by Robin Ashby

May - July 2026

This paper — the third in a series of four — addresses the capability layers that give the institutional architecture of Paper II its operational substance. Papers I and II established the strategic case and the institutional framework. Paper IV addresses the industrial and procurement foundation. This paper covers missiles and air defence; drones and the lessons of Ukraine; Galileo as the space-based navigation layer; sanctions as economic collective defence; and the contribution framework available to the EU's neutral and non-aligned member states.

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The Institutional Architecture - connecting the Assets That Already Exist

Curated by Robin Ashby

May - July 2026This paper — the second in a series of four — addresses the institutional architecture needed to give Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union genuine operational weight. Paper I established the strategic case: the closing window, the hybrid threat scenarios, the five gaps, the command and control debate including the February 2026 JFC command transfer, and the decision-making reforms available within existing treaty law. This paper addresses what the collective defence architecture should concretely look like: the communautaire assets that already exist and need connecting; the bilateral and minilateral frameworks that provide working models; and the maritime dimension. Paper III addresses capabilities and Paper IV the industrial and procurement foundation.

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Paper I of IV - the Strategic Case
Why Article 42.7 Must Be Made Real
Curated by Robin Ashby May-July 2026

"The citizens of Europe are tired of the strategic babble of their leaders... They should stop talking and start acting." — Frederic Mauro, IRIS, October 2021

Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union is the EU's mutual defence clause — legally binding on all member states, invoked once, and largely unknown outside specialist circles. It is, in the common diplomatic phrase, a paper tiger: a commitment that exists on paper without the institutional machinery, military capacity, or political credibility to make it real. This paper — the first in a series of four — addresses the strategic case: why the clause matters, what threatens its credibility, and what structural gaps must be closed. Papers II, III and IV address the institutional architecture, capabilities, and the industrial and procurement foundation respectively.

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A Companion Paper to the Black Sea Fleet Series by Robin Ashby. Reseach support by Claude.ai

The Sea of Azov is the smallest of the seas that touch European Russia, and for a decade now the one most completely under one flag. It has one door. Understanding who holds the key tells you most of what you need to know.
I. The Lock
The Kerch Strait is four kilometres wide at its narrowest point, and every vessel bound for Mariupol, Berdyansk, Taganrog or Rostov-on-Don passes beneath the Crimean Bridge or does not pass at all.1 Russia has controlled both shores since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and built the bridge, completed in 2018 at a cost of $3.7 billion, in defiance of a 2003 treaty intended to leave the strait and the sea itself as shared 'historical internal waters' of Russia and Ukraine.2

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Dropping the pilot

In the famous Punch cartoon of March 1890, Otto von Bismark is seen leaving the ship (of state) having done so much to bring about the creation of modern Germany. As he leaves, he is watched by a young Kaiser Wilhelm ii. Perhaps the analogy is a little contrived, but dropping Keir Starmer who made Labour electable again, watched by a 'young' Andy Burnham, comes to mind.

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The Black Sea Fleet's progressive destruction since 2022 — examined in detail elsewhere in this series — has prompted a question that keeps recurring in defence analysis: why do capable military forces, confronted with evidence that their tactical assumptions are wrong, continue on the same trajectory until the losses become unsustainable? The Russian Navy faced the Neptune anti-ship missile, the Magura V5 unmanned surface vessel, and the Sub Sea Baby underwater drone in succession. Each system demonstrated that existing Russian countermeasures were inadequate. The institutional response was to add boom defences and helicopter patrols rather than to fundamentally reassess.

The French army at Agincourt in 1415 had faced the English longbow at Crécy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356. The institutional response was to add armour and more men. On 25 October 1415, on a narrow muddy field in northern France, the consequences of that failure to adapt became irrevocable.

Agincourt repays modern operational analysis not as colourful historical background but as a case study in exactly the failure modes that produce military catastrophe: terrain misread, command dysfunction, technology underestimated, and an enemy consistently undervalued until undervaluing him was no longer possible. The rhyme across six centuries is audible. What follows is an attempt to make it precise.

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Part One: The Fleet, the War, and the Attrition Campaign

Curated by Robin Ashby, Chair, Eurodefense EU-Russia Observatory

The Inheritance of Sevastopol

Russia's Black Sea Fleet entered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 at the height of its post-Soviet capability. Sevastopol — seized, along with the rest of Crimea, in 2014 — had been transformed in eight years from a leased base operating on borrowed time into a heavily fortified naval complex. New submarines had been commissioned. New corvettes carrying Kalibr cruise missiles had replaced ageing Soviet hulls. Coastal defence batteries covered the approaches. The fleet's air component had been reinforced. By almost any measure, the Black Sea Fleet in early 2022 was the most capable it had been since the Soviet Union's dissolution.
It was also, as events proved, profoundly vulnerable to a form of warfare its commanders had not adequately anticipated.

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