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Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, just like they're breaking their reliance on the American military /s.

Those things take time and have an inertia in both branches: it's easier to continue using the existing resources than standing up your own, but once you're committed to developing a replacement it's not easy to stop.

(EU already did it, however partially, with its own satellite navigation system.)

Yes, they will divert money from their social welfare spending into military spending any day now.

Any. Day. Now.

Yes. Very similar actually. Most of Europe is increasing spending on military defence.

So they finally are doing what trump asked them to do?

No, they've been doing it since Russia's war in Ukraine.

3 days after the start of the invasion, Germany announced a €100 billion increase to military spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitenwende_speech

The fact that you think that's a big number just underscores how dire Europe's security situation is at the moment. One hundred billion Euros sounds like a lot, but China spends two and a half times that much on defense every single year, the U.S. spends 10X that much every single year, and even the Russians spend more than that every single year. Nevermind the fact Europe needs to play catch up here, not just keep pace.

Wikipedia says Russia spent 100 billion in 2023, so increase of 100 billion should be more than that don't you think? Are you misinformed or deliberately lying?

You have to adjust figures for PPP, or Purchasing Power Parity, due to exchange rate differences. In 2024, Russia's PPP adjusted military spend was somewhere between $300B and $400B [1][2]. Their technology is also vastly superior to Germany's and they have a much larger personnel. It doesn't matter how much you spend if you don't get your money's worth.

The 100B euro investment was also a temporary one-off budget allocation that had been distributed over the past 2 years and to little effect: https://www.grosswald.org/eu100-billion-later-fixing-the-bun...

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/debating-defence-budgets-why-... [2] https://militaryppp.com/blog/

By promising to buy more american weapons, more american LNG and investing in american companies.

We europeans are having a really hard time breaking our US addiction. I mean what are we even doing in here

Europe is deciding that US technology addiction is better than Russian subjugation.

It's not a time to be playing political games buying sub-par weapons. Bad for Saab, but that's reality. The world is dangerous again.

If your weapons can stop working according the whim of America, that would be seriously subpar.

The reality is that European solidarity is not ironclad either. Is the US, or Germany, or Sweden more likely to fold and deactivate* weapon systems under nuclear blackmail?

It sounds hypothetical but seriously, what would Gripen do if tactical nukes were dropped on Estonia and Putin threatened the same on Sweden if they didn't back off? I don't know, and you don't either.

*I've not seen credible accusations this is possible, but assuming it is

Those "promises" were meaningless BS. Every European should know that the EU cannot make such promises, because it has no power in those matters. Defense policy is up to the member states, while investments and energy purchases are mostly made by private entities.

*Most of Europe has promised to do something... in the glorious future, where anything is possible. Anything at all!

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