The last installment traced how the geography of European defense has shifted from a Franco-German engine to a genuinely networked pillar, layered across NATO, the EU, and smaller coalitions. This installment turns to the question underneath that architecture: even with the right actors in the right places, what does it actually take to convert what Europe has into usable strategic power?
Resources Are Not Power
Preziosa opens this section with a claim that’s easy to state and harder to sit with: Europe does not fundamentally lack resources. Its aggregate economic scale is enormous. It has advanced industries, sophisticated armed forces, world-class research institutions, technological competence, extensive infrastructure, human capital, deep financial resources. None of that is in question.
What’s in question is whether possessing those resources amounts to strategic power, and Preziosa’s answer is no — not automatically. Defense spending, industrial capacity, technological sophistication, military platforms, and institutional structures are necessary components of power, but none of them constitutes strategic power on its own. Their value comes from the political, industrial, technological, institutional, and military relationships through which resources get connected, mobilized, converted, employed, replenished, and sustained. Europe’s central challenge, on this account, isn’t accumulating more resources. It’s building and maintaining the linkages that can convert the resources it already has into strategic freedom of action, at the speed and scale the moment requires.
Why War Changes the Measure of Power
The return of large-scale war to Europe has made this conversion problem impossible to ignore, because prolonged competition changes what “military power” even measures. It stops being about what a force possesses at the start of a conflict and becomes about what the wider strategic system can keep generating as the conflict continues. Munitions have to be replenished. Platforms repaired or replaced. Personnel trained. Software updated. Production adjusted to operational experience. New technologies integrated. Supply chains and infrastructure kept functioning. Political support sustained.
A force that can’t regenerate what it consumes or loses will progressively lose strategic value, regardless of how sophisticated its capabilities were on day one. Force generation, in this framing, is the mechanism through which potential power becomes usable and sustainable power — it connects finance, industry, energy, transportation, technology, skilled labor, logistics, training, political decisions, and alliance relationships to actual operational effect, which means weakness anywhere in that chain can quietly reduce the strategic value of capabilities that sit elsewhere in the system entirely.
Preziosa is careful to note that Laird treats this as a systemic point, not a narrow industrial one: force generation can’t be reduced to defense production alone. It depends on a wider ecosystem — energy, transportation, data, supply chains, skilled labor, industrial tooling, infrastructure, civil-military planning — all of it.
Resilience Is Not Autarky
This reframes what resilience actually means. In an interconnected strategic system, resilience can’t be equated with self-sufficiency, and strategic autonomy can’t usefully mean independence from allies or the elimination of external dependencies — that goal would be neither realistic nor desirable. The relevant question is the structure of dependence: do critical relationships have alternatives? Can disrupted routes be bypassed? Can production be redistributed? Can essential functions survive the loss of individual nodes? Can states and alliances still act when a supplier, technology, or relationship they normally depend on suddenly becomes unavailable?
Strategic sovereignty in an interconnected world rests less on eliminating dependence than on preventing dependence from turning into paralysis. Strategic agency is compatible with interdependence; strategic paralysis is not. Redundancy, diversification, modularity, alternative suppliers, distributed production, stockpiles, protected infrastructure, industrial depth — all of it can look like inefficiency under normal conditions, and all of it becomes something else entirely once the system is under stress: the preservation of alternatives, and therefore of future freedom of action. Preziosa’s phrase for this is worth keeping: they are repositories of strategic options.
Generate, Regenerate, Reconfigure
The Ukraine war adds a further requirement on top of generation and regeneration, and it’s the section that gives this installment its second half. It’s no longer enough to build capability and sustain it — the wider system has to be able to reconfigure that capability as technologies, operational requirements, and adversary behavior evolve, because the war has shown how fast tactics, countermeasures, software, sensors, drones, and electronic warfare can interact and change each other. A capability that produces a real advantage at one stage of a conflict can lose much of its effectiveness once the adversary understands how it works and develops a countermeasure.
Military innovation, in other words, can no longer be understood as a straight line from research through procurement to eventual replacement. Operational experience feeds directly back into technological development and production, in a continuous cycle: battlefield observation informs engineering and software changes, production incorporates them, modified capabilities go back into operations, and the adversary responds in turn. Preziosa frames competitive advantage as depending less on possessing the single most sophisticated capability at a given moment, and more on how fast that whole cycle — observation, learning, modification, production, employment — can turn.
This also collapses the old choice between small numbers of highly sophisticated systems and large numbers of less capable ones. What the book describes as intelligent mass points toward something else: high-end capability operating alongside affordable, distributed, software-enabled systems that can be produced, replaced, modified, and integrated at operationally relevant speed. Quality and quantity, on this account, are connected by the capacity of the force-generation system to reproduce capability while continuously adapting it — which is why reproducibility itself becomes a dimension of a system’s value, alongside how it performs the day it enters service.
Preziosa draws these threads into three linked capacities that European strategic agency has to rest on:
- Generation — converting available resources into strategically useful effects
- Regeneration — replacing and restoring what prolonged competition consumes, degrades, or destroys
- Reconfiguration — modifying forces, technologies, production systems, and operational relationships as the environment changes
These aren’t sequential stages. They’re interacting functions of a single adaptive system, and their interdependence is the real lesson: generation without regeneration produces impressive but temporary power; regeneration without adaptation risks reproducing capabilities whose relevance is already fading; adaptation that can’t be scaled stays operationally marginal; technological sophistication without sustainment eventually exhausts itself. Strategic power, in the end, resides less in the capabilities a system currently holds than in its capacity to generate, regenerate, and reconfigure them as the competition itself keeps changing.
Next in the Series
Installment five turns to the dimension that ties generation and regeneration together across time: the “temporal architecture” of strategic power, why deterrence has what Preziosa calls an industrial clock, and the quieter, cognitive form of erosion that accompanies every peace dividend.