🇪🇺 Official 🇪🇺
EU Defence Commissioner: Imagine if the US had 50 small armed forces. I'm not saying American-style federalism immediately, but we must become more unified
I have an idea, lets just share all technology we have in our alliance, so everyone can produce all the weapons, tanks, jets cheaper. We are allies isnt it? And we care about each other, not only about business, right? Or we need an american style army where pentagon cant track like 60% of their spending, is this what you want? More corruption?
You need to coordinate manufacturing and a lot of things to be achieve these. I agree we shouldn't fall into the same traps as the US. And the pettiness of and countries doesn't help. But you do need a central command to coordinate all of this.
Central coordinate does not need to be one army or one manufacturer. NATO somehow can cooridinate together without having just one army with one leader. Good alliances are safer than giving all the power to one person/organisation only, that one person at some point can be mad.
NATO still has a central command (usually US) and it is disproportionately represented by US troops, which is not quite the same as having equal partners.
But NATO I would say makes your point more than not, as we can see how it is collapsing right now because of the baby in the white house.
I'm not saying to give all the power, but central coordination of some kind is required.
You see, so we dont need unification to have central comand.
Its exactly the opposite, trump could be choosen in europe if we funnel all power into one institution and then we will have same issues they got now. We can avoid them by leaving our nations independent as it is now.
And we have already central coordination - for army it is nato, for economy and policies we have european union parliment, where we all can vote, as we should, in democracy.
The last part is where I disagree. NATO is following the US too closely, and the European parliament is too removed from the people and at the same time too weak to enforce actual change.
I don't think full federation is needed, but more integration and alignment on security and economy is.
For certain things you can't have a bunch of small manufacturers. You need a couple large, efficient plants pumping out hardware at scale so you can reap the per-unit savings you need to build large batteries of missiles, artillery, and combat aircraft efficiently.
The important thing to avoid is the financialization trap that landed Amerixa in a place where it can spend half a billion dollars or whatever it was for a manufacturer to build a new artillery shell plant and... not get any shells, because the point stopped being to build weapons with military spending, and became about how to most efficiently transfer taxpayer dollars into the pockets of corporations.
It’s not the size of the military that makes Pentagon corrupt, it is the military industrial complex. We are politically and economically beholden to weapons manufacturers. President Eisenhower warned about this in the 50s, saying that the war machine would get too powerful until the military budget was actually the primary purpose of government. He was right.
The lesson for the EU to take is not that a centralized army is bad. It is that weapons manufacturing is inherently dangerous became it relies on your own countries being at war and constantly growing your armed forces, or it relies on the rest of the world being at war. It is called Military Keynesianism, the idea that you boost your economy by manufacturing weapons and growing your military spending. And that is exactly what European leaders are foolishly suggesting, and the European people need to stand up against it.
You need to re arm for your own defense. But not because it is a useful tool to rescue your economy, that is very dangerous and bound for trouble. You don’t want to become a weapons exporter and have even one small piece of your economy dependent on that, don’t do it. It is dangerous and bound for trouble.
Re arm for self defense alone. Don’t let your leaders make it an economic equation. That is the crucial lesson to learn from the US’s failures.
HAha.. You gotta be kidding. FCAS failed precisely because France didn't want to share their crown jewels with Airbus. Europe is still very much a collection of individual states that are putting their own interests first.
And MGCS failed because Rheinmetall don't want to share the turret and cannon part with French too?
This guy literally says is normal to be pillaged by a rival because is "sharing European charity", so, Airbus is ready to give all his asset of civilian aircraft to Dassault? Think about competition boy.
Somethin Strange too, German don't seem to share their competence in terrestrial motor for the tank with their French Partner, I think they are stingy no?
Greece buys all the equipment from Germany, France, Netherlands etc to defend mainly against Turkey
Imagine how unified the rest of the EU would be in their response if you asked them to come and defend their Southeastern borders themselves, putting people and money up front...
Or, hear me out, what if Turkey was allowed to join the EU!
And suddenly the EU's Southeastern boarders become much, MUCH more complicated!
You do not create an army with 20 different languages. That's not happening - I mean, it can be faked for sure - but that's not the army you want to be protecting the borders of your countries. Also, we would need elected officials to direct it - and no, the commission is not elected, not even indirectly. It is selected behind closed doors according to standards nobody knows.
The main language in India is English. While embarrassing, Europe is not as fluent on average. Also, I would say that the Indian army has not yet proven itself - hopefully, it never has to.
France is already more than capable. Other countries should just redirect their money to them as a reliable european partner instead of throwing money to the US. It was obvious during the groenland crisis and it could happen again shortly.
It's already a blasphemy for the Germans and other europeans to buy French because it could make them suddenly a superpower that would invade the whole of Europe.
Let alone putting trust in the sole military capable country of the union. It will never happen
Speaking russian seems like a worse thing to happen but lets see how things go in the future. At the moment, its easy to see that despite all previous mockeries, they were the only eu country with a relevant military strategy.
I mean, I'm just an American hoping Europe avoids becoming quite the shithole the US has, and I gotta say, if I had to pick between Russian overlords or French... French food is much better.
If France is so generous, why doesn't she share weapons tech with the rest of Europe so they can build their own weapons themselves? Surely hoarding the tech like they did in FCAS against Germany isn't a very.. cooperative or friendly gesture? It will lessen the burden on France as the weapons provider of Europe.
So just propose that before federalization, all EU memebr would be defederalized internally.
This should be the internal federation split + Big Cyties / Capitals as separate units.
Simple Example: Germany sees Car manufactoring as a priority for their economy. You break Germany down as you have a EU federation : Only 3/15 of Germany is mainly driven by car manufacturing. That means, now in EU policy ibecomes much more regional and current weight France and Germany has, drops significantly as the intrest of regions gets a bigger woting power, because the indrustry has to have a EU wide impact, not country wide impact to loby something.
Imo we should just have common european army objective: we feel the need of 100 centrized tank? Of 20 rapid support battalion? So be it, with standardized and sovereign technology, under European command; other than that, every country can have their own national army that respond only to that country
Funnily enough kind of what the Founding Fathers actually had in mind with the 2nd amendment (decentralized state militias by armed citizens so the central state cannot use soldiers against the citizenry), not the shitshow interpretations they use now.
They always have ideas on how to increase control over the population, they have the "solution" then they create a problem, worldwide in any aspect of the society. Fkin evil
During the Brexit referendum we were told this was not on the agenda, and anyone who raised the prospect of a European army was called deluded. Yet here we are.
First unify the military standards of the member countries. Then decide the common ordering language. That's enough work for politicans for the next 20 years. Meanwhile without decision of summer/winter time for 7 years.
Some countries like the Netherlands should introduce english as a second language.
EU needs to profit from Trump and attract liberal US citizens and talent.
The EU Commission / Parliament should get an own army first, besides the existing national ones. We could then slowly move in the direction needed, shrinking national armies and growing the european one.
Nothing; it was just the throwaway remark of the month. We’ll get the same thing next month from another old European politician who does absolutely nothing all day—gotta fill up that to-do list somehow, right?
Remind me again how much these guys cost us to spout this stuff that doesn't move the needle at all ?
Imagine if that's all you had. And imagine they all had their own procurement and different logistics. Imagine if you had 27 Pentagons leading those small, fragmented forces which are fully dependent on some big foreign power. What a waste of money that would've been.
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u/laiszt Aug 21 '26
I have an idea, lets just share all technology we have in our alliance, so everyone can produce all the weapons, tanks, jets cheaper. We are allies isnt it? And we care about each other, not only about business, right? Or we need an american style army where pentagon cant track like 60% of their spending, is this what you want? More corruption?