Both NATO and the EU want to spend a €100 billion on defense — and that’s leading to clashes between the two Brussels-based institutions.
The European Union is donning its camouflage pants and flexing its muscles on defense. NATO isn’t happy.
For years, the two Brussels-based institutions have barely communicated when it comes to defense, except for some military cooperation in areas like the Balkans — because they haven’t had to. Defense was NATO’s turf (it is a military alliance, after all), while the EU dealt with trade, farming, climate change and things like standards for heritage cheeses.
It was summed up by a catchphrase popular in military circles: “The U.S. fights, the U.N feeds, the EU funds.”
That’s now changing.
Frankly, I don’t understand the debate here.
You can do both, and leverage both, to improve the capabilities of both. Leave NATO as the standards-definer and overall command structure. But also, the EU should absolutely take more advantage of the economy of scale for big-ticket items like regional ballistic defense, new fighter projects, even submarines and CVNs.
If they do it conscientiously, and are careful to not let military industrial basically dictate procurement policy, the EU could potentially spend less under that aggregated model than they do with individual, independent militaries.
As an American, it’d honestly be great if literally anyone else who was somewhat ideologically aligned with the west would really, seriously underwrite the security of the western world in a military sense.
I’ve been angry for a while, that the EU hasn’t seemed to take Ukraine’s defense too seriously (or at least once it became clear it would be a slogging war). They’ve given old weapons, and pitched in money to buy munitions and stuff, but it’s been clear from close to the start that the lack of munitions-building capacity was a big block, on both sides.
Instead of setting up new munitions factories, the EU has been content to send out old materiel, place orders from the same places everyone else is trying to order from, and let the States fraud the lead for European security. And Russia has used those exact same two years to set up munitions factories and secure supply chains from China, India, North Korea and Iran. It took eight months of Republicans dithering on Ukraine aid for the EU to finally step up and say, “Hey, maybe we should build a munitions factory!” – and it’ll be another two years before it’s up and running.
I keep coming back to something one of the Ukrainians (not Zelenskyy, maybe the head of the Army?) said in the fall of 2022: something like the West is sending Ukraine barely enough weapons to defend itself, but not enough to win. And if it comes down to a war of attrition, Russia’s resources will last much longer than the attention spans of Ukraine’s allies.
I honestly can’t find any recent information on Gripens for Ukraine. Sweden suggested they would do that if they got into NATO, and they have.