In a troubled world, our attention is rightly drawn to the crises that dominate the headlines: the situation in Iran, the situation in Gaza. But with so much demanding our focus, it is easy to lose sight of the threat that sits on Europe's own doorstep. Russia, the war in Ukraine, and a boundary that is being probed further with every passing month. The conflict closest to us is also the one growing more restless.

If Europe is serious about mounting a defence, the conversation has to move beyond the map and onto something more practical: procurement, manufacturing, and supporting the industrial base to produce defence resource at scale. That is the real work of deterrence.

Two of the continent's most important economies are rebuilding their defence-industrial base at the same time. For a business operating across both markets, that is not a passing theme, but a structural shift.

The UK's recent Defence Investment Plan is one of the most significant statements of industrial intent the country has made in a generation. With almost £300 billion of planned investment, it marks a deliberate shift towards a new generation of autonomous and "attritable" systems: relatively low-cost, expendable technologies designed to be built and fielded at scale. That shift also underscores what matters. Producing rapidly iterated systems in volume is not the natural territory of the defence primes, it belongs to SMEs and light industrial manufacturers, the machine shops, electronics assemblers and small engineering firms that can tool up quickly and produce in numbers. If the plan is to work, those are the businesses that will have to carry it.

Germany is on the same journey. Its own turning point, a decisive break from decades of defence caution, has set one of the largest rearmament efforts Europe has seen in a generation in motion.

Much defence discourse has fixed on the funding, and those questions are rightly placed. But as our Strategic Defence Adviser, Angus Fay, argues, the decisive challenge is not the ambition of these plans but the pace of their execution.

Defence procurement on both sides of the Channel has long been criticised as too slow and too expensive. But success will not be measured in contracts signed, but in how quickly new capability reaches operational effect. That urgency matters all the more because what is being funded is not simply the tools for a new era of warfare, but something broader: resilience, reindustrialisation and sovereign strength.

Deterrence begins with industrial capability

This is where the argument enters Sirius’ world. Modern deterrence begins long before equipment reaches the front line. It begins in manufacturing and engineering units, testing facilities and logistics hubs, which makes industrial real estate a genuine part of the national security equation. Britain's recommitment to its nuclear deterrent, including up to 12 SSN attack submarines, will drive demand far beyond the prime contractors into the wider supply chains, and the space, that support them. The same logic holds across Germany's expanding order books. Flexible industrial estates that can house defence businesses and their supply chains are quietly becoming strategic assets in their own right.

This is neither a theoretical interest nor a new one for us at Sirius. One in five of our properties has, at some point, been used for defence purposes, a thread that runs deep through our portfolio in both countries. More recently, we have invested over £200 million in defence-related real estate, including acquisitions near Kidderminster (Hartlebury) and Gloucester (Vantage Point) in the UK and, recently in Germany, a production-led defence asset in Fulda, north-east of Frankfurt. Fulda is anchored by a leading European manufacturer of ballistic protection, including body armour, for military, police and law-enforcement customers. Its work includes the German Armed Forces' MOBAST programme, under which more than 300,000 modular ballistic protection vest systems have been ordered. It is exactly the kind of tenant, building real sovereign capability on the back of government demand, that we want to house and support, and we will continue to seek out more like it across Germany and the UK.

More than a commercial case

There is a commercial logic here, and we are open about it: defence reindustrialisation is real demand, and we are positioning for it. But there is a purpose beyond the balance sheet. Providing the estate on which nations rebuild their sovereign capability, at a moment when the threat to Europe is neither distant nor abstract, is work worth doing, commercially and as a matter of responsibility.

The UK and Germany will be judged not by the size of their cheques, but by whether they can manufacture more, innovate faster and deliver when it is needed most. The real estate and industrial sector has a direct role in making that possible, and at Sirius we intend to play ours.

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Find more about the Sirius Real Estate portfolio in Germany and the UK