Europe is a continent of pacifists – no amount of money can fix Nato
www.telegraph.co.uk
The region is neither militarily or politically prepared to uphold her treaty commitments
  • edge [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Europe is a continent of pacifists

    lol. lmao. Europeans have been responsible for most of the worst atrocities in history.

  • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Article 5 (collective defense) has only been triggered for invading Afghanistan after 911, there's no guarantee countries would honour it when push comes to shove, and he makes the point that they probably couldn't even if they wanted to. There's a reason they didn't just let Ukraine into NATO, there was no guarantee western Europe wanted to send people to die for a bunch of dirty Slavs.

    This guy seems ghoulish in a way you can actually learn from, like Mearshimer, rather than ghoulish in a way that just makes it feel like the ramblings of a dumb bloodthirsty idiot.

    He makes a good point here, the GDP spending number is completely useless way to measure military contribution. When you keep the money within the country, the numbers don't matter.

    Also lol at Poland spending money on boats when the top concern is Russia's land army, that's a real screen-door-on-a-submarine type moment.

    The US's figures are overvalued a lot too because military stuff is overpriced, which he doesn't touch on. When you spend 500k on a missile to blow up a few weather balloons I feel like that shouldn't count for anything. But the US does succeed in having a military and population who support invading anywhere in the name of freedom, so I guess they get a pass.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      8 months ago

      Exactly, this guy is a rational and well informed ghoul. His whole argument seems to be to buy American, but his analysis of European military capacity is pretty sound. I completely agree that US suffers from having a privatized military industrial complex as well though. For contrast, Russia has a state owned industry, and the difference in cost is stark. It literally costs an order of magnitude more to produce an artillery shell in the west:

      Russia’s production costs are also far lower than the West’s, in part because Moscow is sacrificing safety and quality in its effort to build weapons more cheaply, Mr. Salm said. For instance, it costs a Western country $5,000 to $6,000 to make a 155-millimeter artillery round, whereas it costs Russia about $600 to produce a comparable 152-millimeter artillery shell, he said.