Decisions Move Slow, Tanks Move Slower: EU Military Mobility
By Anna Toso | 14 November 2025
Summary
The 2025 White Paper by the European Commission identifies 500 infrastructural projects that urgently need renovation to address the weaknesses of military mobility across the European Union.
Insufficient infrastructure, underfunding, and cumbersome bureaucracy hinder the rapid transport of troops and military equipment to NATO’s Northern and Eastern flanks, especially to the Baltics, which is regularly seen as Europe’s weakest point.
The political momentum regarding EU security will highly likely lead to the multiplication of policies and strategies to improve defence and mobility. But implementation requires additional funds, which will only be available in the long term.
Context
According to Apostolos Tzitzikostas, the European Commissioner for Transport, moving troops and military equipment from the western to the eastern side of the European Union (EU) would require weeks, if not months. Aiming to reduce this transportation time to a few days or hours, the European Commission's White Paper, published in March 2025, has identified 500 high-priority infrastructural projects that require urgent renovation, including bridges, tunnels, railways, roads, and ports. The EU Defence Staff is working with the transport and defence ministries of the Member States (MSs) and NATO representatives.
Operational and Security Implications
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the repeated EU airspace violations of the last few months underscore the urgency of an integrated and more efficient military mobility system. Its importance grows with the possibility of Russia attacking a NATO member state. The rapid deployment of divisions at the EU borders is therefore paramount for NATO. MSs are responsible for ensuring the transport capacity of NATO troops to its Eastern and Northern flanks through national infrastructures. However, existing facilities are insufficient to enable rapidity and interoperability, underpinning the motivation for greater military mobility.
Recent plans involve using mobility infrastructures as a “solidarity pool” across different Member States to transport heavy artillery and equipment. Such a system would resemble the current RescEU mechanism, which established EU funding and coordination of pooled resources, knowledge, and staff across the MSs and 10 additional countries to respond to disasters, such as wildfires and public health emergencies. However, military mobility presents ownership obstacles, as armies often outsource transport services to private companies, which become crucial stakeholders in the realisation of the plan. For example, the German army has contacted strategic firms, such as Deutsche Bahn, Lufthansa, and Rheinmetall, to secure cooperation on the logistics of any eventual military deployment. Differently, MSs have ownership of the capabilities related to RescEU, with the costs of purchase, operations, and maintenance fully funded by the EU.
Moreover, the EU are calling for the standardisation of requirements for carrying critical and heavyweight military equipment and its implementation in ports, railways, roads, and bridges regionally. For example, railways across the European continent have inconsistent gauge sizes, requiring time-consuming carriage changes and reloads on different trains. These inconsistencies create operational obstacles to the seamless mobility of troops and military equipment across MSs’ borders.
Political Implications
Slow bureaucracy and inefficient institutional structures represent major bottlenecks. Among other initiatives, the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) initiative has aimed to bridge defence capabilities gaps in the EU, fostering political cooperation since 2017. Nonetheless, this framework is bureaucratically cumbersome, does not monitor projects’ quality and progress, and lacks formal integration with the EU strategic defence goals. Moreover, the first EU mobility plan was published in 2018, followed by a second action plan in 2021. However, the initial objective to establish a Defence Union by 2025 has not been achieved, and little progress has occurred since the 2018 plan. Challengingly, there is no central authority managing and monitoring military mobility across the MSs. Furthermore, a recent report by the European Court of Auditors underscores the lack of focused objectives and measurable metrics in the current Action Plan for EU military mobility. Policy design and institutional limitations complicate the already difficult cooperation required by the multi-stakeholder nature of military mobility across the EU. For instance, bad planning produced significant delays for the geostrategically relevant Solidarity Transport Hub, spearheaded by Poland and worth USD 40.5b. Clearly, these projects require oversight by European-wide political institutions.
Economic Implications
Underfunding and high financial demand caused all the available funds for 2021-2026 to be exhausted by the end of 2023. Notably, the oversubscription rate – the ratio of requested funds to the total available budget – for the European Commission’s financing for military mobility increased significantly between 2021 and 2023. In the 2023 call, demand for funding was 5 times bigger than the available budget. This surplus demand signals the pressing need for interventions to update the European transport system, which is often underfinanced, especially in cross-border areas. Additional EU funds, such as the Cohesion Funds, are available through calls dedicated to dual-use facilities. However, the assessment of those projects does not prioritise military factors, often allocating finances to less geopolitically relevant projects. During the 2025 midterm review, the European Commission proposed reforms to increase the flexibility of allocating the 2021-2027 Cohesion Funds, which will take effect in 2026 upon Council approval. The European Parliament has already greenlighted the proposal, confirming to align the funds allocation to several new strategic areas, including defence and military mobility, prioritising dual-use infrastructure.
Juandev/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Forecast
Short-term (Now - 3 months)
The political momentum regarding defence spending will likely lead to the publication of multiple policy statements and long-term plans by the EU and its MSs. However, realistic commitments are unlikely to significantly reform investment practices for EU mobility in the short term due to the tight budget constraints.
Medium-term (3-12 months)
Cohesion funds, which cannot be used for military-related investments, will likely be used more frequently to finance dual-use infrastructural projects that improve strategic transport routes.
Long-term (>1 year)
When the ongoing Military Mobility Action Plan expires in 2026, the next calls will likely include larger funding availability, given the oversubscription rate of the previous rounds.
There is a realistic possibility that the next Action Plan will allocate finances to projects that closely align with the strategic defence goals defined by the Commission in the Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030.
