Partly: 58 % of the major weapons European NATO members imported in 2021–2025 came from the US, and some capabilities have no European alternative yet.
What the import data show
SIPRI tracks international transfers of major weapons. In its March 2026 report, imports by the 29 European NATO members in 2021–2025 were 143 % higher than in the previous five years, and 58 % of them came from the United States, the same share as in 2016–2020. South Korea, Israel and France followed far behind, each with under 9 %.
Counting all European states, including Ukraine, imports more than tripled, and the US share was 48 %. Europe became the world’s largest arms-importing region for the first time since the 1960s, with a third of global imports, and for the first time in two decades it was the main destination of American arms exports.
Two countries stand out. Ukraine was the world’s largest importer, with 41 % of its imports from the United States. Poland took 17 % of all imports by European NATO members, split mainly between South Korea and the United States.
The 78 % figure and its limits
The most quoted number comes from the European Commission’s 2024 defense industrial strategy: “78% of the defence acquisitions by EU Member States between the start of Russia’s war of aggression and June 2023 were made from outside the EU, with the US alone representing 63%.” The Draghi report repeated it for a slightly different period, June 2022 to June 2023, on a base of €75 billion.
It covers about sixteen months of emergency buying right after the invasion. It rests on a single study by the French institute IRIS. The same strategy puts the share before the war at about 60 %, so the crisis raised an already high level. And the Commission itself notes in the same document that “data on products’ origin is not collected in a centralised manner.” It is a snapshot of a crisis period. It does not measure where all European defense money goes year after year, and it should not be quoted as if it did.
Where the dependence bites
The sharpest dependence is in specific systems. The clearest case is the F-35: at the end of 2025 twelve European states had 466 of them on order or preselected, SIPRI reports. The Draghi report found that European-made fighters, the Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen, make up only about a third of Europe’s fleet. And the enablers Europe never built in quantity, from reconnaissance satellites to air-to-air refueling, still come mainly from the United States (Could Europe defend itself without the US?). Dependence on these systems is not only about purchase: spare parts, software updates and munitions keep flowing from the supplier for decades.
Imports are also only part of the bill. EU states spent €115 billion on equipment in 2025, and SIPRI’s figures cover only imports of major weapons, not what governments buy from their own industries. Within that total the problem is fragmentation: only 11 % was bought jointly with other European states.
What the EU is changing
In 2024 the Commission set targets for member states: at least 50 % of their defense investment spent within the EU by 2030 and 60 % by 2035, and 40 % of equipment bought jointly by 2030. They are not binding. The binding rules come with money: the €150 billion SAFE loans and the €1.5 billion EDIP program both cap components from outside the EU and its partners at 35 % of the cost of components.
Whether Europe should buy less American is a political choice, and buying the best available system quickly is sometimes the right one. The case for building more at home is about who controls the supply when it matters. A continent that plans and orders together can sustain the long production runs that make European systems competitive. The spending behind all this is tracked in European defence in numbers.