Italy: the 2025-2027 Defence White Paper

Strategic Priorities and Challenges for Italy’s Security

by Andrea Molle

The 2025–2027 Multi-Year Defense Policy Document (DPP) is set against a backdrop of profound geopolitical and strategic transition for both Italy and Europe. Following NATO’s consolidation in Eastern Europe and the growing instability across Africa and the broader Mediterranean, Italy’s Defense Ministry seeks to strengthen the country’s overall deterrence, interoperability, and resilience. The 2025 DPP does not mark a break from previous years but rather consolidates an already established trajectory—one of gradual modernization, technological sophistication, and increasing integration with the national defense industry.

The document emphasizes the need to maintain a credible and autonomous posture within the European framework while reaffirming the centrality of the Atlantic alliance. Its dual objective is to enhance Italy’s participation in EU defense programs (such as the EDF and PESCO) while ensuring alignment with NATO’s operational requirements. This dual membership entails a rise in capital expenditure—not through new funding, but through the stabilization of already authorized resources—directed toward high-tech platforms, cyber and space capabilities, and integrated command-and-control infrastructures.

From an economic standpoint, the DPP confirms a defense budget exceeding €31 billion in 2025, with a distribution that prioritizes investment over current expenditures. Yet behind this apparent consolidation lies a tension between financial sustainability and strategic ambition. Military spending growth remains bound by overall fiscal constraints, and much of the programming depends on maintaining Parliament-approved funding. The goal of reaching NATO’s 2 percent of GDP benchmark is invoked as a political aspiration, but still appears more a trajectory than an imminent target.

A distinctive feature of the document is its emphasis on digital transformation. The Armed Forces are portrayed as actors in an “operational digitalization” process that includes advanced C4ISR systems, cyber-defense capabilities, and the integration of space and maritime domains. In this respect, the DPP continues to advance the concept of multi-domain integration, both technological and doctrinal: the future of Italian defense lies in the ability to operate simultaneously across land, sea, air, cyber, cognitive, and space domains with coherent doctrine and coordination.

Politically, the 2025 DPP aligns closely with the government’s strategic priorities in the Mediterranean and Africa. Italy aims to reinforce its military and diplomatic presence in the “enlarged Mediterranean” — from Gibraltar to the Red Sea — as a vital area for energy security, trade routes, and regional stability. Missions in Lebanon, Iraq, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa are confirmed, though with gradual rebalancing depending on the availability of forces and resources.

Still, the document is not without ambiguities. Several analyses note that the 2025 DPP is less transparent than its predecessors, offering fewer details on specific budget allocations and providing less granularity regarding individual weapons programs. While some interpret this as an effort to simplify public communication, others see it as a step backward in the democratic accountability of military spending.

The Technical Annex, an integral part of the DPP, provides a detailed mapping of ongoing and future programs. It includes development plans for the Army (new combat vehicles and anti-drone capabilities), the Navy (modernization of FREMM frigates, U212NFS submarines, new patrol vessels, and amphibious units), and the Air Force (upgrades to the F-35 fleet, MALE drones, and air-defense assets). It also lists space programs — particularly in surveillance and satellite positioning — through which Italy seeks to consolidate a limited but meaningful degree of strategic autonomy.

In terms of guiding philosophy, the 2025 DPP confirms the Italian Defense establishment’s tendency to view itself not merely as a military instrument but as a national security infrastructure, capable of operating in civilian domains such as civil protection, public health, and environmental emergencies. This dual-use approach responds both to internal efficiency goals and to the political need to build social consensus around defense spending by presenting it as an investment in collective security.

Overall, the 2025–2027 DPP is a document of continuity and consolidation rather than rupture—ambitious in intent, cautious in allocation, and aimed at keeping Italy within Europe’s leading group in terms of defense technology and industrial capacity. Yet questions of transparency and democratic oversight remain open, as spending reaches structurally high levels increasingly justified by a narrative of permanent emergency in international affairs.

The DPP 2025–2027 thus confirms the tendency of Italian defense policy to be both reactive and conservative, rather than fully strategic. It is reactive insofar as it adapts to new threats—hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, and competition in space and maritime domains—but conservative in its decision-making structures and resource-allocation mechanisms. Planning remains largely incremental, adjusting existing multi-year programs rather than redefining strategic priorities. In this sense, the DPP 2025 is more a management document than a visionary one.

Strategically, Italian defense continues to operate on two parallel tracks: full integration within NATO’s deterrence posture against Russia on the one hand, and preservation of a distinct Mediterranean identity on the other, enabling Italy to remain a key player in North Africa and the Middle East. This dual orientation sometimes produces a dispersive effect: forces and budgets are divided among distant theaters and heterogeneous missions (projection, stabilization, deterrence, and civilian support). The result is a globally coherent posture, but not always an efficient one in terms of focus and concentration of effort.

From an industrial perspective, the DPP continues the strategy of integrating the military system with the national production base. The defense complex is portrayed as a technological ecosystem in which major firms — Leonardo, Fincantieri, MBDA, and Iveco Defence — act as bridges between operational capability and industrial innovation. While consistent with the European logic of EDF and PESCO, this approach carries a growing risk of political dependency on industrial-chain maintenance needs rather than genuine strategic priorities. In other words, planning risks being driven more by industrial supply logic than by clear operational demand.

A second critical issue, implicit throughout the DPP 2025–2027, is the persistent absence of a “total defense” or integrated national security paradigm, similar to those found in Nordic countries. Despite growing awareness of hybrid threats—cyber, infrastructural, cognitive, and social—the document continues to frame resilience almost exclusively in military or institutional-technical terms, neglecting the social and civic dimensions of defense. In other words, Italy still lacks a vision that treats citizens, businesses, and local communities as active participants in the national security system. Investments remain heavily concentrated on the armed instrument and its external projection, with limited effort to build a societal resilience capable of reducing Italy’s vulnerability to energy, informational, and logistical crises. The reference point should be the Nordic “total defense” model—as in Sweden, Finland, or Norway—where defense, civil protection, strategic communication, and civic education are integrated into a single framework. Italy remains anchored instead to a vertical conception of security, entrusted to the state rather than shared with society. The risk is that of a modern, dual-use defense system, yet one isolated from its civilian fabric and unable to translate security into a collective civic culture.

A third area of concern involves transparency and democratic legitimacy. Compared to previous DPPs, the 2025 edition reduces public detail on expenditures and programs, making parliamentary and civil oversight more difficult. This may stem from technical reasons — simplifying communication — but politically it signals a broader trend: the normalization of high-level defense spending justified by geopolitical necessity but increasingly insulated from public debate or from a broader resilience strategy. Thus, defense risks becoming a “protected” sector of the national budget, where consensus is built more through the rhetoric of security than through measurable results.

At the European level, the 2025 DPP reflects an effort to align with the emerging “ReArm Europe” paradigm but remains hesitant to promote genuine industrial or operational integration. Italy positions itself as a reliable contributor rather than a conceptual leader, following the Franco-German trajectory while adapting it to its Mediterranean focus and strengths in naval and aerospace industries.

In conclusion, the DPP expresses a pragmatic balance — a compromise between fiscal constraints, interoperability requirements, and aspirations for strategic autonomy. Yet it still lacks a coherent vision of Italy’s role in the international security system. Increased spending, digitalization, and industrial cooperation are means, not ends. The 2025 DPP, though technically sound, does not convincingly articulate the ultimate political purpose—whether deterrence, regional stability, global projection, or mere institutional continuity.

In this sense, the 2025–2027 DPP is a necessary but not yet sufficient document: it marks the consolidation of a modern, technologically advanced, and European-integrated defense policy, but it leaves open the deeper question—what kind of power does Italy aspire to be in a world increasingly defined by permanent competition among great actors?