European rearmament is usually measured in money and order books: budgets voted, contracts signed, factories announced, energetic materials secured. Those variables describe intent and funding. They do not establish that a plant can lawfully start, lawfully continue, and keep running at the rate its owners promise. A defence plant is also an environmental and major-hazard installation fixed in a particular territory, drawing water, discharging effluent, emitting to air, generating pyrotechnic waste that must be destroyed somewhere, and sitting close enough to housing that noise and nuisance become administrative facts. Its ability to operate depends on the continuing legal acceptability of those effects and on its capacity to demonstrate that acceptability through monitoring, maintenance, accredited testing and regulatory review. These are not side conditions attached to production. They are among the conditions under which production remains lawful. The question is therefore narrower and more useful than asking whether environmental regulation delays defence projects. It is at what point, and through which documented mechanism, environmental authorisation, continuing compliance and public accountability stop being parallel administration and start determining whether capital expenditure becomes usable capacity.