The idea of a “military Schengen” is not just another Brussels slogan. Seen from Central Europe, it is about something brutally concrete: whether allied troops and heavy equipment can move from the Atlantic coast to the eastern flank in hours rather than weeks if deterrence fails. Since 2017 the European Union has been experimenting with ways to speed up military mobility, but the war in Ukraine and a string of sabotage incidents have exposed how little progress has really been made. The European Commission’s new Military Mobility Package 2025, with a proposed budget of around €17.6 billion for dual-use infrastructure in the next financial period, is an attempt to finally align the map, the money and the law with Europe’s new security reality.

For Central European states, the geography is obvious. The shortest land routes from Atlantic and North Sea ports to Ukraine and the Baltic states run through Germany and Poland; the north–south axis from the Baltic through Central Europe to the Black and Adriatic Seas has become a strategic corridor, not just a commercial dream of the Three Seas Initiative. That is why, as Polish MEP Dariusz Joński points out, four priority corridors have been identified in the EU planning documents – and three of them pass through Poland. These corridors are officially multimodal: a woven network of roads, railways, ports, airports and even inland waterways that must be strong enough to carry modern main battle tanks and dense convoys, and interoperable enough to work for both civilian logistics and military reinforcement.

The scale of the proposed leap is striking if one remembers where the EU started. In the current 2021–2027 budget, military mobility received about €1.7 billion under the Connecting Europe Facility, and even that figure was the result of a heavy cut from an initial Commission proposal of €6.5 billion. The money has financed ninety-odd projects across the Union – runways strengthened here, rail junctions upgraded there – but the envelope was never large enough to systematically harden the continent’s east–west arteries. Now the Commission is asking for more than ten times as much. Around 500 specific “hotspots” have already been mapped as weak points along the four corridors, from bridges that cannot bear 60–70-ton tanks to single-track bottlenecks and outdated port access roads.

What makes the new package more than just an infrastructure programme is its legal and political core. Today, moving a single battlegroup across Europe can be an administrative nightmare. As Commission Vice-President Kaja Kallas highlighted in a recent debate, some member states still formally require up to forty-five days’ notice for foreign troops to transit their territory, even for exercises. That might have been acceptable when war on the continent seemed unthinkable; in the age of missiles, drones and snap offensives, it is a dangerous luxury. The “military Schengen” proposal aims to create a single framework for troop movements, with harmonised procedures, shared digital systems and clear deadlines for authorising transit. The ambition is that in normal times permissions are measured in days, and in crises in hours, with a special emergency regime that can be activated to override peacetime red tape.

From a Central European vantage point, this is not an abstract question. Since 2022 Poland, Slovakia, Romania and the Baltic states have lived with the knowledge that their highways and railways are not just trade routes but lifelines for Ukraine and for any future NATO reinforcement. They have also seen how easily those lifelines can be probed or disrupted. Poland, for example, has faced incidents of railway sabotage and repeated violations of its airspace by Russian drones, which Central European politicians now routinely cite in Brussels as evidence that the region must be treated as a frontline, not a buffer. In that context, the promise of a reinforced, EU-funded network of “dual-use” infrastructure – bridges, roads, rail nodes, ports and airports designed from the outset to carry heavy armor and to be defended in crises – is more than just cohesion policy in camouflage.

Poland is already a kind of test case for what military mobility means in practice. Even under the modest budget of the current financial framework, it has become one of the top beneficiaries of EU funds in this area, drawing roughly €222 million for fourteen projects between 2021 and 2027. These range from work on the runway at Rzeszów–Jasionka – the now famous hub for Western aid to Ukraine – to improvements at Wrocław and Szczecin–Goleniów airports, new rail and road infrastructure serving the ports of Gdynia and Szczecin, and upgrades to key lines like the Skierniewice–Łuków railway or sections of the S12 expressway in eastern Poland. What unites them is their dual nature: these are projects that improve everyday civilian transport while also making it easier, in an emergency, to concentrate and move heavy forces.

The new package could take this logic much further. Joński and other Central European MEPs have worked to ensure that the legislative text explicitly recognises Poland’s role as a major beneficiary, both because of its geography – as the main land bridge between Western Europe, the Baltic states and Ukraine – and because of the growing list of hybrid threats it has faced. In his public comments he points to projects like the so-called Red Road in Gdynia, a long-discussed but still incomplete access route from the Tricity ring road to the port, as examples of infrastructure that could finally be realised under a larger and more security-driven EU envelope. Similar candidates exist across the region: stronger rail links through the Suwałki Gap towards Lithuania, more robust crossing points on the Polish–Ukrainian border, upgraded Danube and Black Sea facilities in Romania and Bulgaria, and standard-gauge rail extensions that more tightly bind the Baltic states to Poland and Germany rather than to the legacy Russian-gauge network.

The regional implications are broader than any single country. For the Baltic states, “military Schengen” is also about escaping their semi-island status, where much of their land connectivity with the rest of the EU runs through a narrow and exposed strip between Belarus and Kaliningrad. For Romania and Bulgaria, it means turning Black Sea ports and Danube crossings into credible logistics platforms for both NATO and Ukraine, while managing the constant presence of Russian naval and air power across the water. For Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary, it means recognising that their rail junctions and river crossings are not just domestic assets but critical nodes on the central east–west and north–south corridors that NATO would need in almost any contingency. The package also deliberately looks beyond the EU’s formal borders: in cooperation with member states, the Commission plans to extend several corridors into Ukraine and Moldova, effectively folding them into the emerging European defence-logistics ecosystem even before any future accession.

At the same time, there are clear political and practical risks that Central European capitals are keenly aware of. The first is simply financial. The history of the current budget period shows that what the Commission puts on the table is not necessarily what emerges from negotiations among member states. Military mobility’s envelope was slashed last time; there is no guarantee that €17-plus billion will survive intact when governments start trading priorities in the next multiannual framework. If cuts come, they will disproportionately affect the eastern flank, where most of the heavy, expensive dual-use projects are located.

The second risk is political friction over sovereignty. For Western Europeans, the idea of Brussels setting common rules for moving foreign troops may feel like a manageable extension of the single market; for states that only left the Warsaw Pact a generation ago, letting others decide how quickly foreign forces can cross their territory can awaken uncomfortable memories. Yet here, Central Europe is divided. For frontline states like Poland or the Baltic countries, the greater fear is not too much foreign presence but too slow reinforcement. From their perspective, the true threat to sovereignty is a system in which, in a crisis, allies are stuck at customs desks or held back by peacetime regulations on heavy vehicles.

There are also everyday trade-offs between military and civilian mobility. Giving priority to armoured columns or rail convoys in a crisis will inevitably disrupt commercial flows and upend logistics chains. The proposed regulation attempts to address this by insisting on planning, transparency and mitigation measures, but it cannot make the dilemma disappear. Central European governments will have to explain to businesses and voters that more robust, more flexible infrastructure is both an economic opportunity and a form of insurance – that the same upgraded rail line which carries tanks east in an emergency can carry more containers, grain or passengers in peacetime.

Finally, there is a debate within the region about who really benefits economically from this new wave of strategic investment. Past experiences – including big energy and rail projects – have shown that EU money does not automatically translate into contracts for local companies. In Poland, for example, controversies over foreign contractors in other major infrastructure schemes have already fuelled calls for greater “European preference” in defence-related spending and for more systematic involvement of domestic industrial champions in strategic projects. For Central Europe, which wants to be not just a corridor but a producer of steel, rolling stock, construction services and defence technologies, this will be a key battleground as detailed regulations and calls for projects are drafted.

In the end, the “military Schengen” debate is a test of whether the European Union can adapt its peacetime legal and economic machinery to a world where power politics has returned to the continent. Nowhere will that test be sharper than in Central Europe. If the package passes with strong funding and firm rules, Warsaw, Vilnius, Bucharest and Prague could emerge with an infrastructure backbone that underpins both credible deterrence and long-term development. If it is diluted into another modest, underfunded programme, Europe risks remaining where it is today: proclaiming solidarity with its eastern flank, while tanks and engineering units still queue at outdated bridges, narrow tunnels and border posts. For Central Europeans, who live with the war next door and the memory of past occupations, the difference between those two outcomes is not a matter of bureaucratic elegance. It is a matter of security in the most literal sense of the word.