Europe shouldn’t let it’s home-grown defence industries languish in the name of strategic cohesion. Europe has no domestic competition to the F-35, no cohesive military procurement strategy that rewards European businesses, and no mechanism to avoid the shitshow of being entirely dependent on US defence contractors for maintenance of key defence infrastructure.
It also doesn’t have access to nearly as many raw materials as the United States does.
I wish we’d all just calm down with the military spending, but I also understand when dealing with the USA it’s probably safer to not rely on then(us) to keep their(our) word
Trump’s presidency certainly showed that the US is one election away from balking. I’m pretty sure that’s Putin’s plan in Ukraine now.
I hope they have no competition to the F-35 because everyone’s been saying it’s a piece of shit for the last fifteen years.
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I think the situation is more nuanced than that.
Of course, the F-35 program was an incredibly expensive mess (litterally the most expensive weapon program of all time), because of conflicting specs, data leaks, political infighting, cost overruns which are the stuff of legend, etc… At some moments, there were certainly reasons to think the whole program would collapse on itself like wet tissue paper.
But there are operational F35 now. 900+ as of 2023, which is 4 time more than the rest of Gen 5 fighters combined. And performance-wise, it is good, especially on the stealth & avionics parts. On the other side, the J-20 is largely unproven (probably a decent design, but not as good), and the Su-57 is a bunch of glorified prototypes.
Now sure, cost is high, maintenance is time-consuming, availability somewhat below target, but it’s not particularly surprising for high-performance equipment. It may fall short of the ambition of the program on the cost part, but by itself it’s a dangerous and fully operational fighter.
I guess it was worth it in the end.
/s
Anyone that says that has no idea what they’re talking about lol, the F-35 is completely unmatched in terms of multirole aircraft (along with the F-22 for a more fighter-focused role) and likely will only be surpassed with gen 6 aircraft.
The SU-57 and practically any “modern” Russian aircraft are complete jokes that will fall apart with 2 seconds of airtime, and the J-20 and a majority of Chinese aircraft are cheap imitations of western (mainly American) technology which although much more capable than Russian aircraft, still fall behind a lot due to the corruption/authoritarianism in the Chinese military & government absolutely crumpling any hope of having actually competitive engineering & building.
European aircraft aren’t even worth considering as competition either (although are far superior to the previous 2 nations’ mentioned, in most cases). Eurofighters are just another one of the projects European nations had that was plagued by issues from the fact that it was multiple parties with differing requirements/interests/goals trying to develop something. Gripens are less effective budget alternatives to American gen 4 fighters. Etc. Etc.
The combined capabilities in technology, resources/wealth, and pool of experienced/intelligent engineers that the US has at its disposal makes it extremely hard to even dream of touching their capabilities when it comes to aircraft. Even with ground vehicles, the only real competition is Germany… but German armed forces are kind of in a state of disrepair right now, they’ve really neglected their military. It’s really only the defense companies like Rheinmetall and KNDS which can be pointed to as successful currently.
Europe has a long way to go to compete with American military aircraft. Right now the US just has so much more experience and knowledge when it comes to fighter jets & more modern technologies present in said jets. It’d require a lot more investment in aerospace engineering and technology as a whole really, not just when it comes to aerospace. And Europe is currently even more desperate for tech workers than the US atm afaik.
SAAB can’t go toe to toe with American jets, that’s true, and not what they were designed for. They’ll shoot an SU out of the sky before the SU knows they exist. They’re also still the only people to ever get a lock on a SR-71. As an American, I think they make some impressive jets. I even like their cars, but that’s a can of heartbreak.
What? No. The only people saying that shit are Russian or Chinese talking heads, for obvious reasons.
Anyone else is singing the praises of the f-35. Literally it’s biggest issue was with the alignment of its guns being fucky. But these things should never be in position to use guns in the first place.
We didn’t even roll it out for testing at VX squadrons until like 2018, and it’s biggest claim to infamy is just being on the R&D line for like 25 years.
25 years that’s for chumps. FCAS is probably going to take at least 2040 to be ready. Airbus got the contract in 2017, that’s 23 years to 2040, and no of course it won’t be on schedule.
Regarding the relative tech levels, though, Europe as a whole is simply not at the same schedule as the US. The F35 is replacing F16, F18, Harriers, from the 70s-80s, (which of course got upgrades), while the first Typhoon entered service in 2006.
As an American, I agree.
Yeah, if we stopped being the world’s police we might have tax money for something else.
Taxes don’t pay for anything at the federal level. They are deleted. We used to literally burn them back when we collected physical money. We can afford both our current military spending, and every single progressive policy that AOC or Bernie can dream up just fine. (Not saying we should, just that we can. I think we should scale back on certain aspects of the military, but that’s a whole other discussion) The government just “prints” more money and deposits it in the appropriate accounts via the Federal Reserve. Taxes are merely an anti-inflationary device to ensure that inflation stays stable. Running deficits doesn’t cause inflation. If it did, Japan would have been thoroughly fucked in the last 30 years of running the highest deficit by percentage of any country in the world. In reality they are running the largest deficit economy, and barely fighting off deflation.
Edit: this only applies to a sovereign fiat currency.
As an American, I’ve mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I think I think Europe owning it’s own defense would be a solid move to ensure it’s own sovereignty and independence as a modern nation…thing.
On the other hand, I fear this could lead to US - EU military rivalry. While not necessarily the strongest bond in the world, I do value the relatively positive relationship the US and EU have. I hope that bond is preserved and hope we can grow even closer over time.
nation……thing
we prefer the term “sui generis geopolitical entity” ;)
Political entity. I’m surprised how much I like that label. Thanks for informing me :)
I think the fact the EU steuggles as much as it does in the near future they would be at best a weaker China. Lots of bodies but sub par military capabilities. The benefit we get in the US is that we’d only need to come in as support and military guidance rather than sending a lot of troops. They will still suck at doing things as it will be military by committee so in cases with countries like Russia they will most likely defer to the US to just run things.
Lots of euro leaders have said the same over the years. The question as always is, what will you do about it?
Europe should have left NATO 30 years ago, when the first cold war ended, and forged its own path, instead of continuing to get its marching orders from the USA. Now Europe is getting lead into a second cold war by them.
I’m supposed no one is actively adding the us into the EU
Take your bets now everyone, we’ve got:
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“stupidly tries to deepen ties with the cyberpunk oligarchy of China”,
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“stupidly try to deepen ties with the impotent Mafia state in Russia”,
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“stupidly try to deepen ties with petro-dictatorships/monarchies in MENA”,
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“immediately double back because they realized that reducing reliance on the US means having to actually uphold their NATO spending requirements at a minimum to replace the US subsidizing their national defenses”,
and least likely of all,
- “actually do anything even remotely productive towards genuinely achieving strategic autonomy as a democratic superpower in the world independent of the US’ trajectory.”
How can China be an oligarchy if the CCP holds all the power? Billionaires ain’t got shit in China, even fucking Jack Ma was forced to step in line.
Tell me you don’t know the definition of oligarchy without telling me you don’t know the definition of oligarchy.
Ironical
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Europeans starting to realize that NATO is a protection racket is pretty funny.
A protection racket usually involves paying a potential attacker not to attack.
Plus NATO has bombed / attacked europe many times, it dismantled Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist bloc in europe after the USSR.
But which countries have been attacked for refusing to pay into NATO?
Yugoslavia. Also a lot of eastern europe was coerced into joining the EU and NATO, and adopting bourgeois parliamentary democracy (IE capitalist dictatorship), and it wrecked a lot of their social welfare programs. They were forced to do so under threat of economic and military attack, because they can see what happens to countries that don’t accept the western model.
Yugoslavia was engaging in some high crimes of their own. The whole thing was a clusterfuck on the NATO side of things, but Yugoslavia was hardly blameless.
Well this is certainly one flaming hot take
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Defense money is not lost, it pays people within your country. And you can even decide whether it goes to big corps or small companies.
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