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For thirty years, Western democracies have reduced their armies, closed arms factories and counted on a world without large-scale war. On February 24, 2022, this hypothesis ceased to be tenable. Four years later, global military spending reached $2,718 billion, a record since the Cold War, and Eurosatory, the world land defense exhibition which opens its doors from June 15 to 19 in Paris, welcomes 2,100 exhibitors from 65 countries, the largest edition in its history. The States that find themselves there no longer come to look for equipment for peacekeeping missions. They are coming to rearm.
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2,100 exhibitors, 65 countries, a record
$2.718 billion. This is the total amount of global military spending in 2024, according to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which is the benchmark for accounting for global arms. The increase reached 9.4% over one year, the strongest recorded since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. These figures have a direct translation to Paris Nord Villepinte, where Eurosatory 2026 is being held from June 15 to 19 over 185,000 square meters of exhibition space.
The 2026 edition has 2,100 exhibitors from 65 countries. The show organized by GICAT, the professional group of French land defense industries, is held every two years; he had never posted such participation figures. The opening of Hall 4, added specifically to absorb demand, brings the total exhibition space to an unprecedented level in the history of the show. Thirty-six percent of the exhibitors present this week are participating for the first time, a sign of the speed at which new industrial players are entering the defense sector, attracted by the explosion in public budgets. Eighty-three percent of them come from the private sector.
The link between the increase in global military spending and the record attendance at the show is direct. When states increase their defense budgets, they place orders. When they place orders, manufacturers invest, recruit and look for international outlets. Eurosatory is the place where these manufacturers meet, in five days, purchasing delegations from several dozen countries. Forty national pavilions occupy the space this year. Each functions less like a showcase than like a temporary embassy, a place where official delegations negotiate industrial partnerships, sign letters of intent and evaluate equipment before formulating calls for tenders.
L’Europe is the main driver of the increase in defense spending globally. European countries have collectively increased their military budgets by 17% in 2024, to reach $693 billion, again according to SIPRI. This acceleration, triggered by the Russian invasion of l’Ukraine in February 2022, shows no signs of slowing down. It is the direct fuel for the 2026 edition.
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Eastern Europe has taken the halls by storm
France, Germany, the United States, Italy et the United Kingdom occupy the largest areas. This historic “Top 5” remains dominant. But the geography of the show has changed radically since the 2022 edition, the last one held before the Russian invasion of l’Ukraine.
L’Ukraine has a national flag. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, la Slovenia, Bulgaria et Hungary also. Estonia, Latvia et Lithuaniathree countries that share a border with Russia ou son alliée in Belarusare present in force. Scandinavian countries, including the Suède et Finland joined NATO in 2022 and 2023, strengthened their delegations. These states are not coming to observe. They seek suppliers, co-production partners and export opportunities for their own rapidly growing industries.
Poland embodies this transformation with the greatest clarity. Warsaw has increased its defense budget to the equivalent of 4% of its gross domestic product for 2025, double the 2% threshold that NATO asks of its members, and which the majority of them were still struggling to reach three years ago. With a military budget of this magnitude, Poland does not come to Eurosatory to look: she comes to buy, or to find partners to produce on her soil.
La présence de l’Ukraine deserves a separate reading. kyiv sends delegation to arms fair amid conflict with Russia is still active. This choice is part of a precise industrial strategy: attracting investments in its own national military production base, having its operational feedback validated by the allies, pleading for technology transfers which would allow it to manufacture on its territory some of the equipment that it receives today in the form of aid. Eurosatory is the only place in the world where these three objectives can be pursued simultaneously within a five-day period.
Bankers between the tanks
Hall 4, the one whose opening reflects the record expansion of the show, hosts a center called “Financing and Export”, entirely dedicated to financing the defense economy. BNP Paribasthe group BPCEthe Credit Agricolethe Credit Mutuel, The Postal Bank and the Société Générale There are stands there. Weinberg Capital Partners, Allianz Holding France et Largillière Finance complete the system on the investment and insurance side. The fund Apollo Minerva and the consulting firm Bain & Company are announced for the conference sequence on June 17, alongside the European Investment Bank, Bpifrancethe public investment bank, and the Directorate General of Armaments, which manages military purchases by the French state.
We must measure what this presence represents. From the 2010s, under the pressure of so-called “ESG” criteria, for Environment, Social and Governance, several large European banks have gradually tightened their financing policies for the defense sector. These criteria, adopted at the instigation of institutional investors concerned with social responsibility, led certain establishments to set thresholds: any company drawing more than 5% of its income from military contracts became difficult to finance, sometimes impossible. Pension funds, insurers and asset managers followed suit, excluding arms manufacturers from their investment portfolios.
For French and European defense companies, the consequences have been concrete. The Defense Industrial and Technological Base, the BITD, a technical term which designates all the companies working for the armies, from large groups to niche subcontractors, saw its financing conditions tighten at the very moment when States began to increase their orders. Borrowing to invest in a new production line, raising funds to develop a new weapons system: these operations became more expensive and more complicated as banks restricted their exposure to the sector.
The Russian invasion l’Ukraine caused a reversal. European governments have explicitly asked financial institutions to review their defense policies, arguing that the collective security of the continent depends on the industrial capacity to produce military equipment in sufficient quantities. Defense Angelsa network of private investors specializing in defense companies, will also be present at Eurosatory, a signal of the emergence of venture capital dedicated to this sector which did not exist in this organized form five years ago. The “Financing and Export” center in Hall 4 reflects this shift: banks are no longer content with relaxing their criteria internally, they are exhibiting in an arms show.
What the BITD is concretely looking for is the capacity to increase the pace, no longer producing a hundred shells per month but a thousand, within deadlines that wartime orders impose. This large-scale move requires massive investment in production tools, warehouses, personnel and stocks of raw materials. These investments are financed. This is the problem that Hall 4 is supposed to help solve.
Drones, missiles, robots: the arsenal on display
The dynamic demonstrations are the spectacular centerpiece of the show. Organized on the outdoor grounds of Villepinte, they feature equipment in conditions close to real: smoke bombs, coordinated maneuvers, combat simulations. This edition places the fight against drones at the center of these sequences, and the reason lies in a single conflict.
Since 2022, drones have transformed war into Ukraine faster than any military equipment of the last fifty years. Small commercial drones, modified to carry a grenade, have made movement in combat zones almost impossible without prior detection. Lurking munitions, armed drones that circle in the air above an area, search for a target, then crash there by exploding, have destroyed armored vehicles known to be among the most protected in the world. Each Western army is now seeking operational answers: how to detect these devices, how to neutralize them, how to protect its own troops and vehicles.
Rheinmetallthe German arms group and one of the main suppliers to the Ukrainian army, is taking part in the demonstrations. KNDSthe Franco-German group resulting from the merger of Nextmanufacturer of the Leclerc tank, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmannmanufacturer of the Leopard 2, is also involved. The European missileer MBDAwhose systems include the Milan anti-tank missile and the CAMM air defense system, as well as Texela French specialist in propulsion systems, wheels and tracks, for armored vehicles, complete the picture. ARCHa manufacturer of military vehicles whose general director currently chairs GICAT, is also present on the ground. These companies share the same objective in their scenarios: to show how to reduce the direct exposure of soldiers, strike at greater distances, and entrust autonomous machines with the most dangerous surveillance and intelligence tasks.
Hall 5B hosts a less spectacular but equally decisive dimension. The Eurosatory LAB brings together around sixty international start-ups working on intelligent sensors, autonomous systems, new materials and onboard cybersecurity solutions, i.e. the protection of computer systems on board military equipment against hacking and jamming. These companies no longer resemble the young shoots without turnover that the term “start-up” usually conjures up. They have industrial patents, first contracts with armies, sometimes fundraising in phase B, that is to say investments of several tens of millions of euros with professional funds. The industry now refers to them as “industrial deep tech”: cutting-edge technology companies that have moved beyond the research stage to enter the production stage.
9 out of 10 trades in tension
Banks are flocking. Orders are piling up. The budgets have been voted on. There remains one question that the exhibitor brochures do not directly address: who will produce?
The French land sector today employs 55,000 people, from engineers to production line operators, including maintenance technicians and embedded electronics specialists. The BITD Careers Observatory, an organization monitoring employment in the defense industries, has established that 9 out of 10 professions in the sector are currently in tension, that is to say that job offers remain without a sufficient number of candidates. France does not have, at this stage, the human resources necessary to meet its production commitments if orders continue to increase at the current rate.
This imbalance is due to several factors. Land defense professions have long suffered from a lack of image, associated in the collective imagination with aging factories rather than cutting-edge technology. The training of engineers and specialized technicians has not been calibrated to respond to a doubling or tripling of production rates in a few years. And defense companies find themselves in competition with the entire French industrial sector to recruit the same profiles: welders, electronics engineers, mechatronics technicians.
Eurosatory responds to this constraint with a “Trade Tent” whose surface area has been tripled compared to the previous edition, to reach 350 square meters. Open on June 18 and 19, it welcomes around thirty companies and institutions offering recruitment sessions. France Workthe public job placement operator, and Nomad Educationa digital training platform for job seekers, are present there alongside the Ministry of the Armed Forces. A strategic roadmap will be signed at the show between GICAT and France Workwith the aim of directing job seekers undergoing retraining towards the land sector. The targeted profiles, engineers, technicians, qualified operators, have a characteristic that manufacturers now put forward as a recruitment argument: these positions cannot be outsourced to a country with low labor costs. Assemble an armored vehicle or maintaining an artillery line is done where the factories are.
Sécurité civile, catastrophes, frontières : le même marché ?
The security industries, video surveillance, border control, crisis management, civil cyber security, represent 38.1 billion euros in annual turnover in France and 185,000 direct and indirect jobs. This sector, distinct from military defense on a legal and institutional level, is physically present at Eurosatory, in the same halls as the manufacturers of shells and armored vehicles. This cohabitation is not anecdotal.
The question of where defense ends and civil security begins has, since 2022, become difficult to decide. Is a cyberattack on the national power grid an act of war or a homeland security incident? Does a network of drones deployed to monitor a land border obey the rules of the army or the border police? These legal boundaries remain blurred in most European legislation. On the other hand, they are very clear for manufacturers, who often sell the same technologies to both markets, or adapt them from one use to another.
The “HELPED” space, for «Humanitarian Emergency Logistic Project and Eco Development»offers a concrete illustration of this porosity under an immersive dome installed in the exterior area. More than 40 scripted courses simulate responses to natural disasters (floods, earthquakes), major industrial accidents (explosion of a chemical plant, contamination of a water network) or humanitarian crises requiring mass evacuation. The crossing vehicles, crisis communication systems and field medical equipment presented in this space come from the same industrial catalogs as those used in military operations. Civil emergency logistics and military logistics today share common solutions, and increasingly, common suppliers.
Ukraine: when war rewrites doctrine
More than 100 conference sessions are scheduled as part of the “Eurosatory by iDeaS” program, the intellectual and doctrinal component of the show, organized in partnership with international academic and strategic institutions. Four hundred and fifty speakers, generals, researchers, industrialists, political leaders, are expected over five days. A “Focus Ukraine” structures a significant part of the debates.
This is not a tribute. The militaries sending delegations to Eurosatory want to know what works and what fails in an ongoing high-intensity conflict. Since 1945, the wars in which Western democracies have participated, Coree, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, Irakinvolved either much less equipped adversaries or low-intensity conflicts. The war in Ukraine is different: two modern armies, equipped with heavy artillery, ballistic missiles, sophisticated air defenses and electronic jamming capabilities, clash on a front line of several hundred kilometers. The operational data produced by this conflict, on the real effectiveness of drones, on the daily consumption of ammunition in intensive combat, on the robustness of communication systems under electronic attack, on the vulnerability of armored vehicles in the face of new generation anti-tank missiles, are of a nature that thirty years of simulation exercises had never been able to provide.
The themes of the 2026 program include multi-domain superiority, that is to say the capacity of an army to simultaneously dominate land, air, maritime spaces, cyberspace and satellite communications, remote combat and industrial resilience in the face of supply disruptions. This last subject has become hot. Several NATO member states have discovered by supporting l’Ukraine that their stocks of artillery ammunition were exhausted within a few weeks of supporting a high-intensity conflict, whereas they were calibrated to last for months in peacetime. The answer involves an increase in production rates. This increase requires investment. These investments require financing. The actors gathered in Hall 4 this week are, in part, there to answer this equation.
