By Government Decision No. 1533 of 27 November 2024 (published in the Official Monitor No. 1232 of 9 December 2024), the Government of Romania adopted the National Strategy for the Defence Industry 2024-2030. The strategy commits Romania to a 2.5%-of-GDP defence budget through 2030 with 35% earmarked for equipment procurement, sets ten sectoral objectives spanning powders/explosives, munitions, armoured vehicles, naval and aeronautical production, military C4I/cybersecurity, SME advancement, R&D, and a regulatory framework for autonomous combat vehicles and loitering munitions, and invokes Article 346 TFEU to anchor industrial-participation cooperation between foreign primes and national industry. A flagship target is domestic production of two million artillery projectiles per year by 2030.

Analyst notesShow

Mechanism

Government Decision (Hotărâre de Guvern) 1533/2024 is a binding executive act of the Romanian Government, signed by Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, that operationalises the National Defence Strategy's industrial pillar. It is the first cabinet-level horizontal industrial strategy explicitly dedicated to Romania's defence industry since the 2007 EU accession, and it is anchored in three legal levers:

1. Article 346 TFEU invocation. The strategy explicitly relies on the EU treaty's "essential security interests" carve-out to permit directed procurement, offset-style industrial-participation conditions, and equity support to state-owned defence holdings (notably Romarm and the IAR Brasov / Aerostar perimeter) without running into the EU public-procurement and state-aid acquis. 2. 35%-of-defence-budget equipment floor. The strategy locks in a procurement allocation of 35% of a 2.5%-of-GDP defence envelope through 2030 — a step above the NATO 20% equipment-spending benchmark and above the 2.24%-of-GDP NATO target referenced in the queue rationale. At Romania's projected 2026-2030 GDP this implies roughly EUR 6-8bn of annual equipment procurement, redirecting a material share of EU defence-spending uplift toward Romanian industrial offsets. 3. Ten sectoral objectives. Powders/explosives, ammunition and small arms, armoured vehicles and rocket systems, aeronautics, naval production, MRO, C4I/cybersecurity, SME advancement, defence R&D, and a regulatory framework for autonomous combat vehicles and loitering munitions. Centres of Excellence are mandated across each production domain.

The flagship quantitative target is 2 million artillery projectiles per year by 2030, requiring a new powders facility — directly relevant to the EU-wide munitions-supply bottleneck exposed by the Ukraine war and the EDIRPA / ASAP framework that this strategy is designed to dovetail into.

Downstream implications

Redirects multi-billion-euro Romanian defence procurement flows

toward suppliers willing to commit to local industrial participation — affects Rheinmetall, Leonardo, MBDA, Thales, Bae Systems and General Dynamics European Land Systems engagement model in the Eastern flank.

Sits inside the broader **Western and allied industrial-policy

stack** that is the dominant capex-flow theme of 2024-26: the UK Defence Industrial Strategy (Sept 2025), the EU European Defence Industry Programme Regulation 2025/2643, and the Canada Defence Industrial Strategy (Feb 2026) all share the same offset-style industrial-participation grammar.

The 2-million-projectile annual target is aligned with — and is

Romania's contribution to — the EU's 2-million-shells-per-year ASAP/EDIRPA target, which had previously assumed German, Czech and Polish production loads. Romanian capacity reduces the EU's marginal reliance on US/Norwegian/Korean ammunition imports.