Europe must build infrastructure fast enough to match modern risks without sacrificing quality, responsibility, or long-term resilience.
Europe has entered an era where the tempo of its risks is outpacing the tempo of its infrastructure. From record heatwaves in Spain that forced adjustments to military training, to floods in Germany that disrupted civil-protection logistics, to intensified hybrid pressures on the EU’s eastern border, last year revealed a pattern rather than a collection of anomalies. Europe’s strategic environment has become faster, more fluid, and less forgiving of slow-moving systems.
A world in unrest calls for agility
This is why the coming decade’s defense investment carries a unique responsibility; to build infrastructure at speed and to do it responsibly. The question for Europe has moved on from whether it will expand its defense capacity to whether that capacity will be agile and responsible enough to matter. We rarely say it openly, but it is widely felt that Europe’s greatest constraint and greatest opportunity is no longer a lack of capacity or funding. It is time.
defense has entered an era in which the speed of infrastructure, or how fast Europe can build, move, scale and reconfigure, may determine whether broader investments in equipment, personnel and industrial production actually translate into usable readiness. The task ahead is to build at the speed of risk, without sacrificing responsibility.
Defense is accelerating faster than infrastructure
European defense budgets have grown by more than 30% since 2021, reaching €343 billion in 2024 and potentially €381 billion in 2025 (European Council, 2025). Procurement cycles are being compressed. Training and deployment tempo has increased. Industrial policy is being rewritten.
But the infrastructure that supports these activities such as logistics hubs, bases, accommodation, storage, training sites, command facilities, and the list goes on, still largely follows older timelines.
Permanent defense infrastructure typically takes five to seven years from planning to commissioning under normal conditions (JRC/EDA, 2024). Even with accelerated permitting, Europe cannot build permanent capacity anywhere near the pace at which its security environment is shifting. If we are planning for the 2030s, we cannot keep building as if it were still the 1990s.
Climate volatility accelerates the mismatch.
Geopolitical volatility accelerates it further.
Hybrid pressures and supply chain disruptions accelerate it all over again.
Modularity as the new strategic lens
This temporal mismatch is becoming strategically significant. Permanent infrastructure remains essential for long-term, fixed missions and enduring presence. But it is not designed to respond at the pace at which today’s operational demands emerge and evolve. Our experience with large-scale infrastructure projects in Europe show that they typically require several years from planning to commissioning, and defense facilities are no exception. These timelines were manageable in a more predictable strategic environment. In a context defined by rapid shifts in risk, they increasingly limit how quickly capacity can be brought to bear.
What makes this moment remarkable is that Europe’s defense build-up coincides with the actual availability of construction and infrastructure models that are fundamentally different from what previous generations had at their disposal. Modular and circular construction has developed into a robust, high-quality, scalable ecosystem - as good as pemanent buildings, even. These approaches offer the ability to create operational capacity quickly, adjust it over time, and redeploy it as conditions shift.
It’s a proven win. Independent analyses suggest modular construction can reduce delivery timelines by 20 to 50 percent compared to traditional building methods, while also improving cost predictability and reducing on-site waste (McKinsey & Company, 2019). While these findings come primarily from civilian infrastructure, their implications for defense are substantial.
A logistics hub delivered in weeks is a capability multiplier. A training facility that can be adapted or scaled with shifting requirements becomes resilient to uncertainty. Any building system that can be redeployed, refurbished or repurposed, rather than demolished, offers valuable lifecycle value.
This is where Europe’s opportunity is not meant to replace permanent installations with modular ones, but to expand the repertoire to incorporate infrastructure that matches the pacing demands of the current security environment. defense infrastructure can be durable and agile at the same time. By integrating modular and circular approaches more fully into planning, Europe can build systems that reflect the reality of today’s operating conditions.
Flexible, scalable infrastructure ready to deploy
To treat time as a strategic capability is to recognize that readiness is how quickly forces can mobilize, but also how quickly the systems that support them can be created, adjusted or relocated. Rotational deployments, expanded stockpiles, border pressures, major exercises, civil-defense activation, you name it. These demands arise suddenly, shift frequently, and require capacity that can be ready within weeks. When infrastructure can move at the speed of risk, Europe acquires flexibility as much as capacity. And flexibility is a form of readiness.
This is the space where modern modular and circular infrastructure is uniquely relevant. Reused high-quality modules are compliant, durable buildings that can be deployed quickly, adapted over time, and relocated as needs change. Because they already exist as assets within European supply chains, they provide immediate, mission-ready capacity without the delays associated with designing and constructing new facilities.
Modular and reusable infrastructure reduces material demand, shortens construction cycles, and allows facilities to be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. These systems can be adapted as missions evolve, avoiding the rigidity of fixed assets and extending their useful life. In effect, they turn infrastructure from something static into something responsive. In a century defined by volatility, the safest infrastructure is the kind that can move. Europe has no interest in locking itself into structures that cannot adjust to changing conditions. By choosing modular and low-carbon systems, it gains room to maneuver.
If civilian logistics are disrupted under the stresses of climate and natural disasters (as we saw in the opening paragraph), defense logistics, often co-located or dependent on the same transportation and energy systems, are similarly exposed.
The challenge is not that climate events are new, it is that their frequency and intensity have increased, compressing the timelines within which governments must respond.
Europe now has the chance to build infrastructure that is intrinsically more adaptable to these pressures. Modular systems allow installations to be pre-manufactured, transported, assembled and later reconfigured, enabling a level of mobility and responsiveness that traditional construction cannot achieve. These same buildings can toggle between civilian and military use. Circular models extend asset life through refurbishment and reuse, reducing both cost and environmental impact while enabling infrastructure to serve multiple missions over decades.
Future thinking, executed now
What makes this moment consequential is that Europe’s current surge of defense investment will set the infrastructure patterns that future governments inherit. Infrastructure may not determine posture, but it does shape the choices available later like where capacity can be expanded, how quickly facilities can be adapted, and how easily support systems can shift when needs or conditions change.
Framing this as an opportunity rather than a shortfall matters. Europe is not lacking the means to build differently. The industrial base for modular, off-site and circular construction is already well developed, particularly in the Nordics and Western Europe. What remains is to connect these capabilities to defense procurement in a way that reflects today’s operational tempo. This does not require a dramatic shift in policy, only a broader understanding of what infrastructure can do. And we mean modular.
A more flexible infrastructure model would bring long-term advantages. It would enable faster responses to geopolitical uncertainty, whether driven by climate volatility, hybrid pressure or conventional tensions. It would strengthen the connection between defense and civil protection by enabling the same infrastructure to serve multiple roles across its lifetime. And it would reinforce European industrial autonomy by relying on supply chains rooted in refurbishment, reuse and domestic manufacturing.
Most importantly, it would reduce the risk that Europe looks back a decade from now and sees that rigidity was self-inflicted. Expanding quickly is necessary; expanding inflexibly and irresonponsibly would be costly. The effort required today to adopt more adaptable models is far lighter than the regret of discovering, too late, that Europe built systems that could not evolve.
Europe now faces a powerful alignment of strategy, investment, and industrial capability. This window will not remain open indefinitely.