Three years ago, on the morning of 24 February 2022, the assumption that underpinned thirty years of Western defence planning was invalidated in a matter of hours. Large-scale conventional warfare in Europe was not, it turned out, a historical artefact. It was simply something that had not happened recently. The implications of that realisation have been playing out ever since — in policy, in politics, in budget allocations — but nowhere more concretely than in the order books of the Western defence industry, which have been transformed almost beyond recognition from what they looked like in January 2022.
The headline figures are striking enough on their own. Rheinmetall's revenue grew by over 40% in the two years following the invasion. L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics all reported their highest-ever order intake in 2024. Saab's backlog grew from around 100 billion Swedish kronor in early 2022 to over 230 billion by the end of 2025. These are not companies that were underperforming before the war — they were profitable, stable businesses. What changed is the scale and urgency of demand, and the fact that governments that had previously treated defence spending as a political cost to be minimised are now competing with each other to secure delivery positions in backlogs that run years into the future.
The Russia-Ukraine war has been, among other things, the most detailed public assessment of modern military consumption rates since the Second World War. Some of what it revealed was anticipated — everyone knew that high-intensity warfare consumed ammunition at rates that peacetime stockpiles could not sustain. What was less expected was the specific scale: Ukrainian forces were firing 155mm artillery rounds at rates that exceeded total NATO stockpiles within weeks of the conflict escalating. The industrial base had been calibrated for a security environment that assumed high-intensity conflict was either impossible or would be short. Neither assumption survived contact with reality.
"The war has functioned as a live audit of Western military-industrial capacity — and the findings are not comfortable reading for anyone in the procurement chain."
The lessons that defence planners and contractors have drawn from three years of observation are being translated into procurement decisions with a directness that would have seemed politically impossible before 2022. Poland — perhaps the NATO member most acutely conscious of what Russian territorial aggression looks like in practice — now spends over 4% of GDP on defence, more than any other NATO member. It has placed orders for Abrams tanks, HIMARS rocket systems, F-35 aircraft, Korean K2 tanks, and K9 howitzers simultaneously, accepting multi-year delivery timelines because the alternative is accepting the capability gap indefinitely. The Baltic states have moved in the same direction. Germany, after decades of institutional reluctance, has committed to 2% spending and is maintaining it.
The consequence of this demand surge colliding with an industrial base that was not sized for it is a backlog environment unlike anything the defence procurement market has seen since the Cold War. The practical effect for a procurement team trying to place an order today is that standard delivery timelines for many high-demand systems have stretched from months to years. Patriot PAC-3 interceptors: delivery windows are currently five to seven years for new orders. Leopard 2 tanks: KMW's production capacity is committed through 2030 and beyond. Bradley infantry fighting vehicles: the US Army has priority, and allied buyers are working around it.
This is creating a secondary market dynamic that matters for anyone operating in defence procurement. States that placed orders in 2022 and 2023 are receiving deliveries ahead of those who waited. The premium on early contract placement has become real and measurable. And there is increasing interest in alternative sourcing — South Korean manufacturers, in particular, have positioned themselves as a credible alternative to European and American platforms across several categories, with production capacity that was not constrained by the same peace dividend hollowing-out that characterised Western industrial base decisions of the 1990s and 2000s.
The procurement dynamics created by the Russia-Ukraine war are not exclusively a European story. Gulf states, Indo-Pacific nations, and African governments have all been watching the conflict with a professional interest in what it reveals about modern warfare requirements — protection, firepower, logistics, communications, counter-drone capability. The wars that seemed distant have become reference points for capability planning everywhere.
For buyers operating outside NATO's formal procurement structures, the backlog environment at the major Western primes creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is obvious: if you are not a NATO member with a formal relationship with US and European manufacturers, your order goes to the back of a very long queue. The opportunity is less obvious but equally real: the same backlog pressure that is frustrating NATO buyers is creating appetite among Western manufacturers for alternative commercial arrangements, partnership structures, and licensed production deals that would not have been on the table when order books were lighter. And it is opening space for non-Western suppliers — and for experienced intermediaries operating in markets where Western delivery timelines simply cannot meet operational requirements.
The bottom line is that the Russia-Ukraine war has permanently restructured the global defence procurement market. The companies winning business today are those that understood this shift early, positioned themselves accordingly, and built the relationships — with manufacturers, with end-users, and with the regulatory frameworks that govern compliant international trade — that allow them to operate effectively in a market where demand will continue to outrun supply for years to come.