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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

The French mantra is strategic autonomy. We are allies with the USA, we are not vassals of the USA and we do not want to depend on anybody else to defend our own interests or our own agenda. This is why the French army has independent expeditionary and nuclear deterrent capabilities and why nearly all of our military kit is designed and produced either locally or in partnership with nearby European countries.

It's not that we don't trust the Americans per se (although opinions may differ on that topic), but we don't want to have to.

ArianeGroup also manufactures the M51 missile that goes inside our SSBNs and unlike the Brits we do not accept depending on Americans supplying us with the missiles for our nuclear deterrent.

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It seems just a ton of money and R&D down the drain developing something already obsolete for some tiny and very theoretical advantage. It seems more sensible to lose a tiny bit of independence for a small window of time and instead use the money to develop an actual state of the art rocket.

De Gaulle would be rolling in his grave hearing this. The point is not about economic efficiency. The point is that we're not one embargo on foreign components or systems away from crippling our capabilities and surrendering our ability to act independently.

The Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier almost got immobilized back in the early 2000s due to withholding of spare parts from the USA because they were pissed we called bullshit on their Iraq WMD claims. The USA routinely uses ITAR as a pressuring tactic to stop European weapon sales to foreign countries, which is why we're actively scrubbing every last ITAR component from all of our weapon systems.

Just because we're allies doesn't mean that the other party has or will have our best interests at heart. The Americans have proven to be quite temperamental and under-handed when our strategic objectives aren't aligned with theirs.

It is absolutely not a "theoretical advantage". America is not an altruistic partner when it comes to strategic products.

Wish more NATO members had that attitude.

Simple solution - get a decent launcher instead & deploy your nukes in orbit. Problem solved! :)

>we are not vassals of the USA

Aren't you? In 2003 Russia, Germany and France were strongly against illegal American invasion of Iraq. The US invaded anyway, ruining the country. What have France and Germany done about that?

France among many nations called bullshit on the WMD claims, we threatened to veto the UN Security Council resolution authorizing a military intervention and we refused to get involved in that mess.

The fact that the US government decided to unilaterally invade Iraq anyway is not our responsibility to bear. What could France have done more, try and enact economic sanctions or wage war against the USA over this?

"What could France have done more"

Everything it is doing now towards Russia.

Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein?

Besides the logistical, economical and industrial challenge of supplying enough kit to even make a dent against the expeditionary forces of the USA, which were still doped sky-high on Cold War hand-me-downs, that sounds like a terrible idea.

Hussein's Iraq was not Zelensky's Ukraine and not just because of strategic reasons. The Gulf War happened because Hussein wasn't a friendly neighbor to Kuwait.

You are mixing up the Gulf War of 1990, which was in defense of Kuwait, with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on false pretenses.

"Giving weapons and ammo to Saddam Hussein?"

Pentagon is giving weapons and ammo to Azov [0], Ukrainian neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists.

And giving weapons is not everything that France is doing now. Think about other measures too, like cutting off American banks from SWIFT, let them use their ACH.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

They did not participate?

That was very brave

Not very but look at the countries participating. Weaker or intertwined (UK)

"Weaker"

Poland, being Poland, was after Iraqi oil [0].

France kept doing business as usual with the US despite American illegal war.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3043330.stm

Yeah, so ? Did you expect France to fight the US ?

France is a nuclear power. But you are right, a vassal can't fight his suzerain.

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