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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

"Military spending no."

  Country          Military 
  EU Total         49,67
  United States    42,22
  Germany          17,70
  United Kingdom   9,12
  Denmark          8,40
  Netherlands      4,44
  Norway           3,80
  Poland           3,00

And if we take % of GDP the US looks worse on military aid.

And if we take % of military budget, the US is last on the list.

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And this is chart is missing EU strongest military - France, they do not announce all the support they give for strategic reasons.

France published a list of equipment they sent to Ukraine, about an hour ago [1]

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/international/live/2024/02/16/en-dire...

Quoting and translating the best I can (any translation error is mine):

Ground - Air

    SAMP-T : 1 system and ASTER 30 missiles
    CROTALE NG : 2 systems and some missiles
    MISTRAL : 5 systems and hundreds of missiles
    RADAR : 1 GM 200

Air - Ground

    SCALP : about a hundred missiles
    A2SM : several hundred bombs starting in February 2024

Artillery

    CAESAR : 30 canons and tens of thousands of munitions
    TRF1 : 6 canons and tens of thousands of munitions
    LRU : 4 systems and hundreds rockets

Armoured and liaison vehicules

    AMX 10 RC: 38 AMX 10 RC and tens of thousands of 105mm shells
    VAB: 250 (including VAB SAN)
    VLTT P4: 120 vehicles
    MILAN: 17 launch positions and hundreds of missiles

Engineering and small arms

    Anti-tank rockets: several thousand
    Anti-tank mines: several thousand
    Assault rifles: several thousand
    12.7mm machine guns: several hundred
    Other ammunition: several million

Aerial domain

    Drones: several hundred reconnaissance drones and small tactical drones
    Jet fuel: tens of thousands of cubic meters

No idea how important / relevant it is. Just posting

"SCALP : about a hundred missiles"

Wish Germany would send long range Taurus.

I do wonder what the shelf life of those things are? Germany could hand over 200 - 300 of those things and just order new one to replace the oldest one in their stockpile.

In general, Germany is not especially keen to enter into conflicts with Russia. They are a long time economic and energy partner. It is why Germany has a history of thwarting EU energy security and solidarity, and why it dragged its feet w.r.t. early in this conflict.

Energy security like from the US? Germany spending billions to switch to US LNG as fast as possible just to be gut punched. Russia delivered gas without problems for 50+ years, the US is not able to deliver LNG reliably for 1 year:

"The U.S. has become the biggest exporter of LNG to Europe [..] U.S. President Joe Biden last week paused approvals for applications to export from new LNG projects to review the climate change and economic impact of such projects." [0]

The only energy the EU can really control is solar, but probably has not enough room for panels to replace LNG with green hydrogen.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-lng-export-pause-...

Parts of the German government party SPD are long term friends of Putin and need to be dragged by their feet for every inch of the way. At least the chancellor changed course - luckily otherwise there would be no support at all. But he is still fighting a fraction in his party of Putin friends - there is a "governor" of the government party SPD in power who took money from Putin.

> France published a list of equipment they sent to Ukraine, about an hour ago [1]

Which is something new, until yesterday I was in with OP.

> No idea how important / relevant it is. Just posting

Here's some background: https://www.politico.eu/article/france-germany-macron-scholz...

All the help is great, but these numbers are tiny compared to what Russia is fielding. Thousands of shells sounds nice until you realize Russia fires tens of thousands per day, and is able to manufacture hundreds of thousands per month. 30 cannons is nice until you realize Russia has thousands. The West can not solve this problem by dusting off whatever is left in the forgotten corner in the storage and sending it out and forgetting about it. In fact, they can't even solve it with fully mobilizing their capacity - which is still not happening - because while Russia (and USSR for decades before that) has been maniacally arming and stockpiling, the West has been reducing their capacities and relaxing under the impression that the Cold War is over, wars are thing of the past, and whoever thinks Russia is a threat is to be laughed at and needs their head checked. Now some are waking up, but from waking up to gaining back all the lost capacity and getting even to parity is a long way, and one that will be very expensive - which I am not convinced the West is willing to do, especially when it's for benefit of some ex-Soviet country that's not even in the EU. Maybe Putin will take it and then just stop, because this is always how it worked with aggressive fascist dictators in the past.

That's not exactly true, as there's plenty of M198 built, they're just in storage. Ammunition is what's the main issue.

There's also plenty of M1 tanks in US.

The question arrises, when people start to realize that the storage of those wasn't up to the required standards.

The worst part was that multiple countries dragged their feet on providing arms and realizing that 2022 was the start of a new arms race. And multiple countries are still reluctant to commit to refill the arms stockpiles.(hence the inability to even start mass production 2 years after it's clear what's going on)

> whoever thinks Russia is a threat is to be laughed at and needs their head checked

As a Lithuanian - I know this all too well. My mother tongue is Russian and Russian political class had been dominated by anti-western, revanchist and militaristic rhetoric for at least the last 17 years. No one in the west bothered to listen.

Could the strategic reason be to avoid explaining why they give so little?

Unlikely. The Caesar artillery systems are large, expensive and well publicized.

They need USAs 155mm production the most. the fact that we cut off our specialty is ridiculous.

I’m not sure how the calculations work in other countries, but the US was/is heavily depreciating its donations, and funding/facilitating a much of European donations.

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artill...

It's more messed up than that. The ROI on US dollars vs Euros is stupefying. There has been a fairly significant spend IN the us retooling for this war. The ramp up of 155 production ISNT aid to Ukraine but is going to benefit them.

And I called out 155 for a reason, the ebb and flow of it has been at the forefront of Ukraine being successful or failing. It is the the most consistently asked for and consumed large item as it in combination with drones has proven effective beyond anyones expectations.

There's also ring trades where the us donates surplus gear to European countries to get them to donate hardware to Ukraine - somewhat inflating tallies. Greece got several c-130s in expectation that they would donate 152mm ammunition.

Yes, and Germany has ring-traded a lot of military equipment, e.g. several dozens of Leopard 2 tanks.

Sure about the 152mm? Not 155mm?

> Sure about the 152mm? Not 155mm?

I'd have to double check but its quite likely. 152mm being the popular Soviet/WP large artillery caliber which Ukraine no doubt has (or had, at the beginning) a lot of legacy Soviet-era heavy artillery.

Did some searching, didn't find anything.

The only thing I could find about Greece is Germany giving 40 Marder APCs to Greece so Greece could give 40 BMP-1 to Ukraine.

Um, so the UK has rejoined the EU?

I'm mean it's a nitpick, but you're kinda nitpicking.

Not sure where I wrote that the UK is part of the EU.

  EU Total         49,67
  United States    42,22

Then there is a list of countries, like the US, some EU countries and the UK. The entry "EU Total" is not the sum of these countries.

With the argument, the list implies the UK being part of the EU b/c it is listed below, would be the same as the "United States" are part of the EU, because it is listed below.

You’re counting UK but not Canada in the EU?

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