EU buys too much defense equipment abroad, especially from US: Report
EU buys too much defense equipment abroad, especially from US: Report
European Union countries are buying too much of their defense equipment abroad and failing to invest in joint military projects, a landmark report warns.
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In other news: rain mostly wet, nights darker than days, state leaders neither honest nor sharpest knives in drawers...
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My gut feeling (and reading about current weapon sales) says the 2024 numbers are way lower. We had so many domestic contracts for Rheinmetall, BAE, SAAB, Thales, ... and the smaller companies.
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Yes, that's why the US wants european countries to increase defense spending. It inevitably means more money in the pockets of the american MIC
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We also need to make sure that EU made equipment can be produced without non-EU components which is currently not the case for a lot of it.
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Well yes, but fortunately in most areas we already have decent European manufactured equipment. Hopefully just a matter of ramping up production
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Oh, they invest in a lot of joint projects.
Everyone loves joint projects in cooperation with the US to develop something again that they could already have bought from that pesky competition of a neighbouring country.
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At the moment, Germany and France are cooperating in the development of a future MBT and a future fighter jet without the US.
Recently the discussion was more about, why the Europeans, especially Germany, are developing own equipment instead of buying already market ready US equipments. This is how we ended up buying the F-35 (yet there was an additional strong time constraint on that one).-
Most of the US orders Germany placed had no proper European alternative:
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F35 for nuclear sharing with the US. Integrating it into Eurofighter, would have forced the entire blueprints of those to be handed to the US. Hence only 10 are ordered, with more Eurofighters also having been ordered.
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Patriot has SMP/T as a European alternative.
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Arrow3 has no European alternative at all.
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Chinook is a large helicopter, then anything made in Europe. So no clear cut alternative.
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Poseidon P8 nothing in Europe comes close in capability. Germany is part of a group working on one though lead by Airbus.
Those are some large orders, but the rest is mostly European, with maybe some US components. Honestly the German procurment is not especially bad with American components.
MBT both Leopard2 and Leclerc are ITAR free. For fighters Rafael is ITAR free and Eurofighter is pretty close, Austria did have problems with GPS components, but there are alternatives available. Turkey is interessted because Eurofigther is close to that. Only Gripen has a lot of problems.
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At the moment German companies are cooperating with US ones to produce yet another MLRS system competing with existing ones.
At the moment Norwegian companies are cooperating with the US to develop their next iteration of air defense based on German missiles even that is part of a complete system already.
At the moment UK is cooperating with Italy and Japan to compete with the French-German jet project you already mentioned.
At the moment Poland is heavily cooperating with South Korea to develop huge parts of their modernized vehicle fleet while buying the rest from the US.
See how they all prefer to either buy from or develop with countries further away to avoid their neigbours perceived as competition?
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