About this talk

European defence debates are increasingly framed around spending targets, industrial capacity, procurement volumes, and strategic autonomy. These questions matter. Yet they risk obscuring a deeper problem: defence capability is not only a matter of resources, but also of knowledge. Drawing on Hayek's theory of dispersed knowledge and competition as a discovery procedure, this lecture argues that modern defence systems face a distinct epistemic challenge. In the absence of real operational selection pressure, peacetime militaries rely on proxies such as exercises, readiness indicators, certification procedures, interoperability targets, and procurement benchmarks. These instruments are necessary, but they are imperfect substitutes for battlefield discovery. The war in Ukraine illustrates this problem with unusual clarity. Ukraine's defence effort has generated rapid learning through frontline feedback, decentralized experimentation, improvisation under scarcity, and short loops between soldiers, engineers, firms, and decision-makers. Such knowledge is not easily codified, simulated, or purchased. It is tacit, local, and revealed under pressure. By contrast, many European armed forces have long operated in a peacetime environment in which formal preparedness can be mistaken for combat-tested competence. The lecture finally considers the uncomfortable case of mercenaries and private military actors. While normatively problematic, they raise an analytically important question: do organizations exposed to repeated operational testing and competitive pressure accumulate combat knowledge differently from bureaucratic peacetime forces? The argument is not a defence of privatised violence, but a Hayekian inquiry into how military organisations discover, process, and act upon knowledge. Europe's defence problem is not merely a spending problem. It is, more fundamentally, a knowledge problem.

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