[EU] European Bloc signing deal to integrate its 23 armies

[Deleted]

Only took 2 pages before someone came into the thread and tried to derail and started using ethnic slurs and started defending the USSR occupation of Eastern Europe.

Back on topic.

5 Billion seems like a low funding for such a program of such a size. I mean integrating 23 different armed forces cannot be so cheap.

[Deleted]

Not a bad start imo. We need a strong military and be less dependant of the US asap.

A united EU army can easily compete with the big bois on the world stage.

[Slant]

[Blablabla, I love communism, ramblerant]

Cute. Now go out and play with the other kids. Adults are trying to have a conversation here. You've had quite enough attention for one day already.

[Mafic]

Denmark, Ireland, Malta and Portugal didn't sign up.

Austria did though at the last minute.

Huge blow to the supposed EU army without Denmark and Portugal.

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Is not a NATO, or EU member.

Are both NATO members, i'm pretty sure that this problem is a bigger NATO problem.

Ukraine issue alone will test the fragility of the supposed EU army. And the border disputes between Turkey and Greece ensures that an EU army falls apart fairly quickly when the EU army refuses to defend the Aegean.

[JohnBrown1917]

Germany must never be allowed to re-arm, this is in the interest of the stability of the continent. They will abuse their position. Merkel is proof that they are permanently deranged nation.
.

Can I have some of whatever you're on?

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Ukraine issue alone will test the fragility of the supposed EU army. And the border disputes between Turkey and Greece ensures that an EU army falls apart fairly quickly when the EU army refuses to defend the Aegean.

How will it? Ukraine has nothing to do with EU... How do you not understand this?

[Mafic]

And what makes you think the EU army will? Its not our problem. Not that the NATO did anything about Ukrainel... so im not getting your point.

..I don't even think the NATO ever did anything outside it borders. Are you not confusing it with the UN-backed armies?

https://www.nato.int/cps/ic/natohq/topics_71652.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_m...ntion_in_Libya

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Can I have some of whatever you're on?

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How will it? Ukraine has nothing to do with EU... How do you not understand this?

Russia and EU are not going to sit on the sideline if Ukraine goes belly up again.

[JohnBrown1917]

https://www.nato.int/cps/ic/natohq/topics_71652.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_m...ntion_in_Libya

Thats strange... well lets hope this EU army is purely defensive.

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Russia and EU are not going to sit on the sideline if Ukraine goes belly up again.

Russia is the one causing it. And its really not a problem of the EU, and we are currently doing nothing. How does forming an EU army change this?

Although the Greece issue should actually be easier, since only Greece is part of the EU.

[Deleted]

Huge blow to the supposed EU army without Denmark and Portugal.

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Ukraine issue alone will test the fragility of the supposed EU army. And the border disputes between Turkey and Greece ensures that an EU army falls apart fairly quickly when the EU army refuses to defend the Aegean.

Ukraine is not really a test for the EU army. Ukraine is not part of the EU, nor to my knowledge does the EU have any defensive treaties with Ukraine. So saying that this EU venture will fail because of Ukraine, is like the US, UK will collapse because they failed to uphold the Budapest Memorandum. It is nonsense.

Also, Portugal did not vote on the issue because their Parliaments are still debating.

Edits: Typing is hard, when doing several things at once.

[Deleted]

Ukraine issue alone will test the fragility of the supposed EU army.

Again, Ukraine is neither a EU member nor a NATO member.
so how?

And the border disputes between Turkey and Greece ensures that an EU army falls apart fairly quickly when the EU army refuses to defend the Aegean.

Maybe - that would be a problem, we will see what happens, if this occurs.

[Dhrizzle]

Huge blow to the supposed EU army without Denmark and Portugal.

No offense to either nation, but what makes Denmark and Portugal such a big deal?

[Vankrys]

No offense to either nation, but what makes Denmark and Portugal such a big deal?

i think that was sarcasm.

[Mormolyce]

One of the reasons why the EU is trying to have a more unified defense policy is to be more efficient.

Idea is to stop having different equipment across 20 or so members, so a more unified set of tanks plains or whatever in the end. The US may be crap in providing healthcare if you look at how much they spend but equally the EU countries are crap at defense spending.

The US is a massive outlier in military spending, it's not exactly a goal anyone should be trying to match.

[Macaquerie]

I wonder what kind of perspectives a militarily integrated Europe would have on its own history. I mean, for most of their existence, France and Germany were composed of rival feudal states and I feel like the significance of those conflicts has been downplayed. In hindsight, they just look like petty internal squabbling getting in the way of the inevitable unification, rather than serious international wars. I guess this is already starting to happen on a larger scale with Europe as a whole, and seeing how relatively friendly and peaceful Europe has been for the last half century makes you really scratch your head when thinking about just how violent the continent used to be and how people managed to get so fired up to kill each other over tiny plots of land that everybody is happy to share these days.

[Danuru]

The US is a massive outlier in military spending, it's not exactly a goal anyone should be trying to match.

Part of the reason the US has been such a large outlier is because of it's position on the world stage. Whether you like it or not, the Cold War effectively turned the US into the world police, as the US had to up it's spending to keep up in the arms race with the Soviet Union. As an American, I'm actually rather glad about a stronger European military, more spending from them means less required spending for the US.

It also hopefully means we can look more into internal affairs as external threats would be less of an issue, with a stronger European military. Of course, knowing people, we won't actually do anything useful and just bicker about relatively unimportant things as we always do.

[Thekri]

The US is a massive outlier in military spending, it's not exactly a goal anyone should be trying to match.

This isn't coming anywhere close to matching it, and some of the posters on here are overstating this quite a bit. This doesn't change anything about the political control of anyone's Militaries, and the money involved is tiny. The equipment budget for this joint program is only $5.8 Billion USD, against a 2016 total of $226 Billion USD from member states, so this will only supplement spending by ~3% when you add the operations budget which is still being worked on.

This is a very important step for a coherent response to specific EU Missions, but this is far from a single military just yet.

[CostinR]

Sounds good in theory.

Will end up being a total crapfest that leads to less military spending and none of the benefits that should become from a unified military force.

[Mormolyce]

Part of the reason the US has been such a large outlier is because of it's position on the world stage. Whether you like it or not, the Cold War effectively turned the US into the world police, as the US had to up it's spending to keep up in the arms race with the Soviet Union. As an American, I'm actually rather glad about a stronger European military, more spending from them means less required spending for the US.

The US spends a buttload on the military because it chooses to do so.

[Allybeboba]

Didn’t I make a thread about something like this in a “what if” scenario a long time ago?

Found it....
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ates-of-Europe

Who knew it may come true?

[Slant]

I wonder what kind of perspectives a militarily integrated Europe would have on its own history. I mean, for most of their existence, France and Germany were composed of rival feudal states and I feel like the significance of those conflicts has been downplayed. In hindsight, they just look like petty internal squabbling getting in the way of the inevitable unification, rather than serious international wars. I guess this is already starting to happen on a larger scale with Europe as a whole, and seeing how relatively friendly and peaceful Europe has been for the last half century makes you really scratch your head when thinking about just how violent the continent used to be and how people managed to get so fired up to kill each other over tiny plots of land that everybody is happy to share these days.

Back in the olden days, wars meant that some dipshits meant on a field outside town and had a go at each other. It wasn't until they actually started razing cities and targetting civilian population that warfare fell out of vogue.

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Didn’t I make a thread about something like this in a “what if” scenario a long time ago?

Found it....
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ates-of-Europe

Who knew it may come true?

It's a natural development. All of these things make sense economically and from a budget point of view. And that's really the thing that the EU dances for. Saving a buttload of money. Even combining an army (ignoring procurement as the obvious reason) means that should anyone be attacked, he'll save money by having other countries come to the rescue.

The EU? It's less about political power and more about simply saving or making a buttload of money. Oh, and keeping France and Germany busy counting money instead of bashing each other's heads in and dragging everyone else around with them into the abyss of violence.

[Skroe]

There is always the Aster, SAMPT.
It's what you mean (i think) - Another possible platform is a drone, both recognizance and strike.

No, the Aster isn't the right solution. Aster is a fine missile, but it utilizes the PAAMS system (which is kinda Euro-Aegis). In some regards, it's also closer to the US's SM-6 than Patriot.

Patriot isn't just a missile. It's a battery that launches them (actually usually around 6 of them), an antenna vehicle, a control vehicle, a radar and a power plant.



What is actually aging out and needs replacement is the Missile / launcher itself, and not the other vehicles. So the replacement would need to be compatible with everything else the missile and launching station are integrated with.

Germany and the US were working on MEADS to be just this at one time, as the formal replacement, but despite it's clear advantages over the Lockheed Martin PAC-3, it was considered not enough of a step up for the US, so it dropped out and started making PAAC-4 as a stop gap to more advanced capability down the line. There is nothing wrong with it, other than it wasn't what we were looking for.

Germany and several other countries are buying MEADS though.

A key reason is probably the same reason the US has chosen to pass on other missile programs the past five years: it's really interested in the medium/small missiles of the 2020s and beyond being two stage missiles in order to extend range.

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The US is a massive outlier in military spending, it's not exactly a goal anyone should be trying to match.

And the US still under-spends, with respect to it's commitments, by at least $100-$150 billion per year.

Nobody will match the US simply because the US operates a global defense strategy, whereas Europe only needs to do regional defense. But the US, isolated from most of the human race by two enormous oceans, HAS to do a global defense strategy.

And the biggest share of expenditures for every modern military is not procurement or wars. It's people. It's salaries, healthcare and all the things needed to employ several million (if you including civilians at the pentagon) workers. And that doesn't even touch the enormous industrial base on top of that that is indirectly supported.

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Not a bad start imo. We need a strong military and be less dependant of the US asap.

A united EU army can easily compete with the big bois on the world stage.

Easily? Not a chance. It toally depends on what you buy and how you buy it. If Europe starts now it might be ready in 30 years. Maybe. Probably longer.

I don't talk about defense things because I get my rocks off at explosions. I talk about defense things because besides entitlement programs, they are the largest share of the US budget and where our tax dollars go, and the ways in which the government, over the years has made that expensive or cheap is interesting and comparing it to what other countries do is equally as interesting.

The US spends $700 billion a year on defense. It could easily be a lot more. The reason it is that, and not another $300 billion on top of that, is because the Pentagon has, since the mid 1980s, been very aggressive about uniformity and life-of-the-purchase costs.

Let me explain what I mean by that, and then we'll talk about how it relates to Europe.

The US military in 1984 had tremendous hardware diversity. Several different families of tanks and AFVs. Tons of different types of fighters, of missiles, of nuclear weapons, of submarines, of warships, of helicopters and so forth. During the Cold War, where defense dollars flowed freely and entitlement costs were low, the military bought the latest and the greatest, with little thought of how long they'd own it for, or what else they had in their inventory.

But here's the problem with that. If the military bought one jet, it doesn't just buy the jet. It buys the ENTIRE industrial base of the jet. All the suppliers. What happens if that Jet breaks? Even if the Pentagon decides not to buy anymore, suppliers, facilities and factories still need to stay in a semi-hot state to repair it. What happens if the military decides to buy just 50, and have the option to buy another 200 in an emergency? Every electrician, every weilder, every small 3rd party supplier company needs to be able to provide services for those 200.

The Military in 1984 was a lot of this. And it a mess. And it was made worse by Reagan's 600 ship navy plan, which was achieved by reactivating and retrofitting incredibly obsolete ships for a few years.

Then the 1990s came around, and it was clear, with the Cold War being over, this could not happen. So the military rapdily retired entire families of things, from ships, to nuclear weapons, to aircraft designs. What capability matched 1 for 1? Not necessarily. It took a decade for there to be a kind of successor to the AIM-54 Phoenix carried exclusively by the F-15 Tomcat following it's retirement in the early 2000. But, for better or for worse, they decided that the efficiency and lower costs of operating fewer, more multimission systems, was better than supporting a larger number of highly specialized platforms.

This wasn't always the right call. Particularly in some types of Carrier-based aircraft. But the Military did the right thing in rapdily retirement the last of the "41 for Freedom" SSBNs in favor of Ohio SSBNs. It did the right thing in in phasing out the Peacekeeper MX ICBM in favor of the Minuteman III. It did the right thing in retiring the F-111 and F-117.

So this brings me to your comment. A United EU army won't compete with anyone unless it consolidates its procurement and industrial base to keep recurring costs as low as possible. And yes, $700 billion in recurring costs is low for the US compared to what it could be if it didn't retire some platforms years or even decades early.

This is no trivial thing I'm saying. Europe currently employs 28 different tanks. It needs to be one. There needs to be the Rafale or F-35B for carrier aircraft. There needs to be the Eurofighter for Air Superiority. No other Euro-fighter belongs anywhere. There needs to be one 6000 ton Surface/ASW ship class, not 14 different classes. There needs to be one tanker, one tactical lifter aircraft, one strategic lifter aircraft, one attack helicopter, one scout helicopter, and one air defense missile. So on and so forth.

THe problem is, right now, this is not close to how things are, and getting from where we are, to there, is not a matter of waving a magic wand and just doing it. Fundamentally it means the loss of millions of jobs. The US went through this in the early 1990s (see chart below).

[img]https://timemilitary.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/consolidation-chart1.png/img]

And that's not even remotely comprehensive. The US defense industry is a fraction of it's pre-1993 size in terms of number of companies and number of workers, because the need by the military is much less. For example, Northrop won the contract for the next US bomber 18 months ago. The B-21 Bomber will be in production from 2021 through 2045. The next bomber program won't enter production until after 2050 most likely. And that's being generous. It could be even later. That means that Boeing and Lockheed are completely out of the Bomber business until then. This contrasts with the rapid succession of B-52 upgrades / failed replacements in the 1960s, the B-1 in the 1970s and 1980s, and the B-2 in the 1980s and 1990s.

A united EU army will mean that entire industrial centers supported by tax dollars will shut down. Are the Spanish ready to get out of Ship building forever, only to buy their ships from Italy and France? Is every tank factory in Europe ready to shut down as all countries buy German tanks? Is everybody ready to buy Norwegian missiles?

That's a key reason this has been so difficult. Are you ready for YOUR tax dollars to go support a little Norwegian town that just happens to have a factory that makes something essential to your EU army?

Don't get me wrong. Europe needs to do this. Desperately. It needs 1990s style defense consolidation. Some of your countries just need to get out of specific industries. But that's difficult from every angle to do. Americans demanding Europe spend more ignore this point, not realizing that some of the most blighted parts of our own "Rust belt" were at one time major hubs of the military industrial complex that defense consolidation wiped out jobs from. It will be the same in Europe. A EU Army done right means, post consolidation, some place vibrant now becomes Detroit, and loses 2/3rds its population over 30 years.

It has to happen. Europe will be far better for it. But make no mistake: it's eating a shit sandwich. And it's also going to take decades to do.