Eu doesn't have the weapons to replace the US, much less do anything more. All action by EU and European Nato is at best a political stunt to make US and Trump to change their minds.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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The European Union as a whole already spends more on defense than Russia or China, it is just a matter of coordinating spending by unifying efforts
yeah spends it on US weapons. It's a money laundering front to funnel european public money to private US investors
Luckily that is a problem with a solution as simple as obvious
I don't see it
Ok, my failure, I believed that if the problem was to spend your defense budget on US weapons, the option to spend it on non US weapons was evident. In any case, surely the French, Belgian, Spanish or British defense industry would be happy to have new clients
The issue with that is that the production of arms in the EU is next non-existent when compared to Russia and the US. Europe has been heavily de-industrialized and already has problems covering its energy budget. You can't just throw money at that problem, because you don't just need to rebuild factories, but infrastructure. Not to mention the brain-drain caused by academics moving to the US and China where actual research happens.
I have not found data on arms production grouped by country, but I have found data on exports and this makes me doubt your statement. In any case, we do not have to face a war right now, considering R&D and industrialization as defense objectives could put us at the right level in perhaps a decade.
Have a read through here if you're interested https://hir.harvard.edu/untitled-2-ready-for-combat-the-future-of-the-european-defense-industry/
Money spent=/=production or productive capacity or performance.
Everything in the west is just really fucking expensive, because defense industry is a racket meant to make profit not weapons.
And? Bying 1 152mm artillery shell at 4000$ doesn't automatically mean it is better than the 1000$ one, it just means you got overcharged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures
Just taking Germany+France+Italy+Poland+Spain already comes more than what Russia spends
Nor am I a military expert, I do not know how reliable they are that data or I will discuss the efficiency of the expense, but I am sure to have 27 army generates many inefficiencies that could be resolved by centralizing things
Ok, lets take a look at the IISS table because the sipri only uses estimates for Russia. When you look at the source of the IISS table you get to a graph which shows that while for all other countries expenditure, the one for Russia and China have been ppp adjusted, meaning that the actual expenditure is different. The adjustment tells you what worth of goods you could buy from I'm assuming US market. Why the wiki table shows only these recalculated values for just Russia and China is beyond me. I also found an actually accessible article version of the FT https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/russias-2024-military-budget-exceeds-total-eu-defense-spending-ft/ar-AA1yWN0u To sum up the Russian expenditure DID exceed the european as in the FT, it only may be unclear what weapons they bought with it, but for the argument that EU outspends them, that is wrong.
It'll take a while for the supply chains to be created and to get to speed.
In the 3 years of the war we didn't seen any creation of the military industry in Europe, instead we did seen deindustrialisation in key countries like Germany and UK. Also their so called ally, US, actively supress them with energy prices and actions like Nordstream sabotage. Even the country which military expenditure risen the most, Poland, just buy weapons in Occupied Korea, with barely any effort of sustainability other than forking money. And all that even before we talk about corruption and wastage in governments and military industries.
It's a herculean task to create the sort of military industry Russia or US have. Aside from supply chains, there's energy production, factories, workers, engineers that would be needed to spin up such industry. It's a decades long process. Either European leaders have absolutely no clue how modern industry works or they're just cynically lying to European public.