‘Soft Power’ Meets ‘Hard Security’: Leveraging Europe’s Regulatory Strength for Energy Transformation in Defence

Europe’s defence-industrial expansion coincides with the urgent need to accelerate the energy transition and reduce dependencies on imported fossil fuels and critical raw materials. This paper examines how the EU can leverage its regulatory power to align defence spending with wider sustainable transformation objectives. It argues that energy security provides a pragmatic entry point for integrating clean innovation into defence policy, given operational vulnerabilities of conventional fuel systems and rapidly evolving warfare realities. New defence frameworks such as the European Defence Industrial Strategy and Readiness 2030 still pay limited attention to the strategic role of energy transition for military readiness and Europe’s broader resilience. The paper outlines opportunities to systematically link defence procurement with clean industrial policy and to foster security-centric energy and material innovation through existing EU legislative and funding instruments. It concludes that achieving regulatory coherence between defence-industrial build-up and energy transition can help to strengthen Europe’s technological leadership and strategic autonomy in a volatile geopolitical environment.