Europe measures its rearmament in things you can photograph: tanks, frigates, air defence batteries, drones and the artillery shells it has promised to produce by the million every year. I work one step earlier in that chain, and from where I stand the picture looks different. Before a shell exists, someone has to make the energetic chemistry that goes inside it, and that chemistry begins with a material almost nobody in the defence debate ever names: nitrocellulose.
Nitrocellulose is what you get when cellulose, the fibre that gives plants their structure, is treated with acids until it becomes the energetic base of modern propellants. It was discovered in the nineteenth century and it has never been replaced. Every artillery round, every mortar bomb, every rifle cartridge fired in Ukraine depends on it. There is no substitute chemistry waiting in a laboratory. If you control nitrocellulose, you control the tempo of an ammunition ramp-up; if you do not, your production lines are hostage to whoever does.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. European demand for military grade nitrocellulose is in the order of twenty thousand tonnes a year against a domestic capacity that independent estimates place at a fraction of that, leaving a structural gap of ten to fifteen thousand tonnes. Worse, the traditional raw material is cotton linters, and more than seventy percent of the world supply comes from Asia. The United States is not in a better position: it currently imports the totality of its TNT, and has seen prices of basic energetic materials multiply several times over. Europe has spent three years rebuilding the visible layers of its defence industry, steel, electronics, final assembly, while the chemical layer underneath them remained where it was: thin, ageing and dependent on imported feedstock.
Why did nobody notice? Because chemistry is a bad photograph. Energetic materials plants are heavily regulated, unpopular as neighbours, expensive to permit and historically low margin, so for decades the rational business decision was to close them or move the exposure abroad. Each closure was individually sensible and collectively strategic self-harm. The result is that the most consolidated, least redundant link of the European ammunition chain is precisely the one furthest from public attention.
The reason I remain optimistic is that Europe is unusually well placed to fix this, and for once the advantage is natural, not negotiated. Cellulose does not only come from cotton. It grows in European forests. The Iberian Peninsula alone hosts one of the world’s most productive pulp industries, built on eucalyptus, with quality standards that already serve the most demanding civil applications. Turning that continental raw material base into a sovereign source for energetic materials is an engineering and industrial challenge, but it is our challenge, on our territory, with our feedstock. The European instruments are finally pointing the same way: the latest defence industrial programmes explicitly list propellants, powders and their raw materials among the capabilities the Union wants built at home.
I will not pretend the problem is solved, least of all by us. Scaling from validated laboratory results to industrial plants takes years. Qualification with powder makers is slow by design, because ammunition is not a product where anyone should move fast and break things. Permits for energetic materials facilities are among the hardest in European industry, and rightly so. And the incumbents, the handful of large groups that kept this capability alive through the lean decades, deserve recognition rather than lectures from newcomers like me.
But an industrial base is an ecosystem, not a club. The ramp-up Europe has promised itself will not happen on the existing footprint alone, and every strategic review says so. It needs new capacity, new entrants, second sources and regional redundancy, the same logic the Union already applies to semiconductors and batteries. It also needs member states to treat the chemical layer as critical infrastructure: faster permitting for energetic materials projects, land with the right safety distances, and procurement signals long enough to justify private capital.
My conclusion, after two years inside this problem, is moderately optimistic. The institutions are reacting, the funding windows exist, and the raw material is literally growing on European soil. Sovereignty is counted in platforms and munitions, but it is also counted in kilograms of chemistry. Europe has everything it needs to stop outsourcing that count. What it cannot do is keep rearming on an empty chemical stomach and hope nobody asks what the shells are filled with.