EU Military Mobility Area and Infrastructure for Defence: Engineering the Geography of Readiness

For decades, Europe’s ability to deploy and reinforce its armed forces has been constrained not by strategic will, but by physical and regulatory fragmentation. National borders, outdated infrastructure, and incompatible transit rules have created bottlenecks that make the movement of troops and materiel across the continent slow, costly, and politically complex. The EU Military Mobility Area, a central component of the Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, seeks to transform this weakness into a strength by establishing a seamless logistical and regulatory space for European defence. It creates a continent-wide framework that allows forces to move within harmonised legal and infrastructural conditions, integrating civilian and military transport networks into a dual-use system. This initiative converts deterrence into a tangible capability: it ensures that Europe’s political decision to defend itself can be matched by immediate operational movement. Mobility thus becomes both an expression of sovereignty and a measure of readiness. By physically connecting Europe’s territories, the Military Mobility Area turns geography itself into an instrument of security, ensuring that deterrence is no longer limited by distance or bureaucracy but enabled by infrastructure.