Future Combat Air System (FCAS) | Hacker News Reader

Future Combat Air System (FCAS)

airbus.com

38 pointsbelter63 comments

French here, last I've heard of it Dassault and Airbus were deadlocked on the split of industrial responsibilities and couldn't seem to be able to find an agreement. Hopefully I'm wrong, but this was starting to sound more and more like a repeat the break up of the Future European Fighter Aircraft project in the 80s that led to the separate Dassault Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon programs... Which is a shame because we've done at least one successful French/German multinational military jet before (Alpha Jet). The Main Ground Combat System project, which is supposed to be our next generation main battle tank, was also deadlocked last I've heard of it.

One thing's for sure, the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war has profoundly shocked the entire European continent and has led to the biggest re-evaluation of our defense strategies in decades, along with energy policy and even food supply security. It's too early to tell exactly what will come of it, but national defense budgets are already rising significantly.

Sorry, random question: Would it be that bad if everyone went ahead and developed their own fighter according to their own requirements, but using the same basic technology, by which I mean they shared the development of engines, radar, avionics, weapons etc.?

No, because the cost of development is exceptionally high. As with the F-35 there are a lot of countries who would never be able to afford that level of capability unless the model of shared funding and development was taken.

At the end of the day, poorly implemented systems, etc are far worse than shared technology.

Not a military analyst, but I'll try. Also French, so highly biased.

That sounds a bit like the F-35, which was supposed to be a common platform for three different military jets with highly conflicting requirements (US Air Force wants an affordable single-engine stealth supersonic fighter, US Navy wants it operable from a aircraft carrier, US Marines wants it hovering like a Harrier), which is the definitive example on how to NOT manage a multirole jet fighter program, to the point where it's still not in full-rate production twenty years after the start of the program, arguably still not fully operational, still hideously expensive on per-hour fly rate and finally the US decided to both modernize old F-15/F-16 jets and start developing the sixth-generation NGAD.

The Dassault Rafale on the other hand has three variants (B for twin seats, C for mono seat, M for the French Navy) which are basically identical except for a reinforced undercarriage for the M variant. Increased development costs and delays were mostly because of shrinking defense budgets and political squabbling post Cold War, not because of technical development issues. While the F1 block was an emergency stopgap for the Navy, later iterations and especially the F3R have proven to be very versatile and able to carry out basically any mission that the French Air Force and French Navy has, to the point that it is expected to be the only fighter/bomber/interceptor type in service when all the remaining Mirage 2000 variants get decommissioned in the coming years.

I'd say the main differences are that culturally Dassault at its core is more of an design and engineering shop than an aircraft manufacturer (most manufacturing is outsourced, critical components and assembly are done in-house) so emphasis is placed more on design than production [0]; France wants an independent defense industry and an all-around fully capable military on a budget, thus we have no choice but to keep our costs under control in order to afford all of our gear; and finally while the Rafale ecosystem has a lot of companies (Thalès and Safran for the biggest subcontractors), Dassault is unquestionably in charge of the program industrially and the DGA knows better than to try and micromanage them or to ask impossible or unbearably expensive requirements.

[0] https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R1148.html for an analysis of the Mirage days of Dassault

It's a matter of degree, of course. Lots of military hardware and systems share components; the same engine is used on different planes, etc, or the same with some modifications, or different engines using the same components - a matter of degree.

The biggest(?) example of sharing development to a greater degree is the F-35 plane. Three models - themselves mostly the same - were developed for about a dozen countries and more services (e.g., in the US, F-35s are used by three services, the Navy, Air Force, and Marines). The idea was that by sharing development costs, they could all buy better planes and then standardize parts (creating economy of scale there), maintenance, training, and functionality - everyone's planes would work perfectly together in combat, you could land your plane anywhere and get parts and maintenance, one country's pilots could fly another's planes. That's all fantastic for a deep military alliance.

But a big challenge is making three variations on one design please so many customers, fit so many needs. Think of development or integration projects in IT: Understanding, defining and meeting the specs of customers is often the hardest part. Imagine doing that for organizations as large as one US military service, such as the US Navy with all their needs and users and powerful people who want their way - imagine the specs of a plane that lands and fights off aircraft carriers - and then the powers in government that funds them, people in Congress, the White House, etc. etc. Now expand that to a dozen countries and all their military services - with different sized carriers, or different fuels, different cultures, different approaches to air defense, different legislators, etc. By serving all these needs, you can end up with outcomes that please everybody and serve nobody.

The F-35 has great positives - it's widely considered the best plane in the world - and negatives and has been the target of much criticism (including by people who didn't get contracts or get their way). Nobody seems anxious to repeat the process to that degree, but that doesn't mean it has no value.

I'm kind of suggesting the opposite of what the F-35 project did - which is, to my understanding, was to sell the same plane, with slight variations to the three branches, all of who have wildly varying requirements.

They tried to maximize commonality between the 3 variations, but from what I can tell, this plan hasn't worked out, and they've ended up building 3 different planes that happen to look similar.

My suggestion was to drop the pretense of building the same plane for the French and the Germans - but use the same (or similar) engine for all planes, use the same or similar radar, and avionics, and put them in different airframes.

Afaik at this point, one only needs to reprogram the avionics with control laws for each specific airframe.

Then let each nation put their own sensors and bits and bobs to satisfy their own requirements.

From what I've read, the Chinese are sharing the engine, radar and avionics tech between the J-10 and J-20 fighters.

I have followed military aircraft technology for decades. Development costs for systems have risen very high.

There are some systems like fighters in Europe, that are made by multiple small manufacturers. As a result the build quantities are low and costs high. Old systems are never renewed. They don't do well in export competitions. Some manufacturers are geographically located in one country like Dassault. SAAB is very much in Sweden with some US components.

One solution to this would be to just make each project a large international megaproject, have most of the manufacturers in Europe coordinate. But this kills competition and makes projects complicated. There is a another method too.

Instead, share basic research and build prototypes and share the lessons from those. Have manufacturers form multiple co-operating international alliances to compete for each program. Sustain multiple programs, even if it means some duplicity. Competition and independent capabilities are more important.

Are fighter jets so important in the age of drones? Shouldn’t we invest in drones which are much cheaper? If “but we need something for air superiority”, then isn’t it achievable with space superiority and drones?

Everything is needed

I wonder if unmanned but not independent aircrafts are just too risky to rely on them completely. If the adversary develops a successful jamming attack (or whatever, idk anything about this) it denies the country to operate in the area completely.

With all the effort being put into full self driving cars I would think a full self flying plane would be a lot easier with a lot less edge case scenarios than driving on a road with other users.

You would think wrong. There are no full self-driving cars today. All of them rely to some extent on human operators, either in the car or remote.

Sure it's possible to build a drone that can take off, fly to a designated point, drop some ordnance, and return. But we don't have the technology to automate complex missions like air superiority or close air support. Those require a human in the loop making real time decisions. If the human isn't right there in the airplane then the risk is that communications will be disrupted. In a major conflict with a near peer adversary, most of our communications satellites will get knocked out.

> Are fighter jets so important in the age of drones? Shouldn’t we invest in drones which are much cheaper?

AFAIK: Militaries have done a lot of research, as you can imagine, and the overwhelming conclusion is that UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles or drones) can do some things very well, some things not well at all - the truth of all technologies, once they shift from dream to practical reality. In almost all cases in the military (and probably in life), AI does better when teamed with a human. Particularly, AI does poorly in unexpected situations. Driving on streets with rules and lanes and signs is difficult enough for AI; war is chaos - the main tactic in war is overwhelming your enemy's decision-making with chaos. AI is too brittle; it can only handle what happened last time.

The widespread solution - I'm not sure about China and Russia - is teaming AI-controlled systems (UAVs in this case) with human commanders, so for fighter plane scenarios you get a human in a fighter plane controlling several UAVs. The US is just reaching the next development stage in this technology; look up 'loyal wingman'.

> Instead, share basic research and build prototypes and share the lessons from those. Have manufacturers form multiple co-operating international alliances to compete for each program. Sustain multiple programs, even if it means some duplicity. Competition and independent capabilities are more important.

Does this idea have any currency in military or industry circles, do you know?

If you look at how the F-15 came to be, NASA did a lot of the initial aerodynamic work. Engine wise, there were multiple suppliers (although not initially). No fly off.

For F-16 and F-22 each there were two different manufacturers with different prototypes. Both had also multiple companies co-operating. Many companies have merged since.

There are some hard questions. Sometimes groundbreaking technology is developed in a company and other designs become obsolete quickly. This happened with stealth. How do you deal with this?

I think you have something but I think they could also try building to cost instead of function.

There are also advantages in everyone using the same equipment (even if cheap) and some way needs to be found to buy in larger batches without demanding the union set of the features that each nation wants. Somehow it also has to keep some national capabilities alive otherwise it will be unpopular.

Think of Ukraine - it needs replacements but has to get soviet stuff because that's what it understands. It is an inconvenience really isn't it? NATO can't just send them some Patriots or F-16s.

I wonder if this thing will ever fly, and if it will, will it fly in less than 2 decades after the comparable US effort has entered service.

With our dear dictator neighbor on the east showing his true colors, you may end up surprised how a common enemy like that can unite, even if temporarily, such a diverse place as European union

That's might sound a bit off topic but... ALL modern "wars" so far (in quotes because modern wars seen the past ones are veeeery asymmetrical) have proven a thing: tech makes difference to a certain extent, but in the end motivated boots on ground decide, the classic western doctrine "few and well armed" have failed the real life test.

That's means: we can perhaps made super-duper powerful fighter jets able to hit any target on earth unseen by no one, unstoppable. That's can just destroy the enemy army/infra, if that's the real target ok. BUT if the target is a bit more than just crushing enemy infrastructures/army (perhaps because the war have the exact purpose to grab those infra/resources that need them) the result of such hi-tech war is a sea of destruction, big amount of resources and life lost, people starving to the destruction but no winner.

I'm convinced that more than hi tech combat systems we need many low tech, low costs weaponry + deterrence capacity (nukes). An enemy of course can hit some of them, some part of domestic infra easily with his super-hi-tech systems but can't really win. No one can produce enough of EuroFighters, F35, Su35, FCAS, DDG-X etc to really crash a swarm of simple and cheap war machines dispersed on the ground. Soviet Union discover that in Afghanistan, USA repeat the same mistake already made in Vietnam in the same country, France idem in Libya and Mali etc and in all those cases the enemy was just armed with limited tech against hi tech weaponry, logistic, TLCs etc.

It's not much different than the classic mainframe vs cluster. Modern hyper-expensive systems are powerful SPOF while a cluster can survive on far less nodes. Similarly a country with a distributed enough productive and civil infrastructure can't easily be hit. An enemy can hit a target, few targets, but keep doing so with very expensive and so not much numerous weaponry means just having created destruction so entering the country still demand boots on ground, and on destroyed infra with a now very angry population that have nothing more to loose it's hard and nightmarish, beside that having wiped out most valuable infra at high prices (hi tech is costly) there is the need to rebuild many things because no war typically have the sole purpose of destruction, except those suicidal. Try to sell themselves to the defeated enemy to "morally" conquer it, as per Clausewitz classic, also fail the defeated survivors are not just "people who want the peace again", they have lost anything and they are very angry, some, probably the most wealthy and the most poor might change flag quickly the big mass of all other will not.

In defensive terms that's not much better, the better defense is the attack capacity, witch means nukes these days, not few big but many small that can be smuggled in/around the enemy territory to give back a so deep wave of destruction no one is really interested to attack you first. The rest is these days not "classic war", like propaganda, corruptions, sabotage, etc.

Long story short: to protect themselves nations should look at classic Swiss, Sweden, a small professional army for the few big weapons, all able population trained and armed at home, regular yearly based not-that-long and well paid exercise etc. To conquer there is a big need of powerful propaganda (we have it, too much and in wrong hands these days) to motivate people to go to war and than a guerrilla like invasion after classic asymmetric war techniques to weaken the enemy, in any case a war preps can't be hidden these days so attacks by surprise are a thing just on very local scale.

> the classic western doctrine "few and well armed" have failed the real life test.

I'm really not seeing where or how you've come to this conclusion. Desert Storm and Iraq show the uselessness of low tech boots on the ground. Not even just the Iraqi side, most Western troops went on a long unoposed jaunt through the desert rather than fighting an enemy. I really don't see how an adversary is going to stay motivated after something like the air war before Desert Storm. Utter helplessness on the ground as 100s of aircraft and standoff munitions hit their targets. Sure guerilla war may continue but it remains to be seen how well guerilla warfare will work with 100s of advanced drones loitering overhead.

Few and well armed win the initial combat, but what were the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan and why?

The outcome of the 1991 Iraq war (Desert Storm) was that they had to leave Kuwait. Which was exactly what was intended. And as a side effect their military was degraded enough that they no longer posed a threat to other US allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia.

I'm talking about the 2003 invastion of Iraq. Desert Storm was won by many and well-armed, not few and well-armed, and a political solution was planned from the start: Kuwait's former government would run Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein would run Iraq.

> I really don't see how an adversary is going to stay motivated

It does not "stay motivated" it became motivated by extreme anger and suffering. Iraq government was defeated, yes, and then? Most of Iraqis I bet now hate USA more than Saddam during the war and not just USA government but all citizens, lifestyle, culture a real hate that will last for decades.

The USA, as a country, lost the Iraqis war. Only few benefit from it because war means private profit, as reconstruction thereafter. But the country at a whole lost the war a Iraqis lost the war.

If that's the target, just very few benefit for themselves against their own people interest ok, hi tech have proved to be effective, but a war between countries, especially not that asymmetric, is another thing.

Hi-tech doesn't have to mean high-cost. See Javelin/NLAW which are relatively low-cost and surely can be made much cheaper if a large number are to be ordered.

> No one can produce enough of EuroFighters, F35, Su35, FCAS, DDG-X etc to really crash a swarm of simple and cheap war machines dispersed on the ground. Soviet Union discover that in Afghanistan,

The Ukrainians just proved you wrong, but with advanced anti-tank missiles not airplanes, which are hi-tech but low-cost anti-tank missiles.

Anti-tank grenades and missiles are not high-tech comparatively speaking. You can get 40 anti-tank missiles for the price of one F-35 fighter pilot helmet.

European (mainly French / German) attempts at 'strategic autonomy' had been consistently thwarted by the UK's recalcitrant presence. Brexit should've been an opportunity, but Putin's invasion of Ukraine quickly shut that window. With the Germans now re-orientating their energy dependency from Russia to the US, as well as committing to buying billions of dollars worth of US military hardware, there is no chance of any 'EU led third way'

Could you give some examples of how the "UK's recalcitrant presence" have 'thwarted European strategic autonomy'? Because the last time I checked, the UK was doing a lot of the heavy lifting of European security.

Google "UK opposes plans for EU army", ca 2016

"Strategic autonomy" comes from investing in your armed forces, not adding a layer of bureaucracy on top of them

The EU army would be a layer of bureaucracy less, not more. So far the plans have not gone anywhere because national governments have been unwilling to give up final authority over their armies ("No German will command a Frenchman into battle!"). This has been partly due to historical mistrust, partly due to political considerations and partly due to a lack of urgency. This means that setting up any military activity in EU context (such as Operation Atalanta for example) requires going through all the individual national governments and asking for troops.

A true EU-wide army would be a standing organization with pre-approved funding and means that could move much quicker than the current system. Investing in armed forces is also important, but adding up the funding of the individual member states already brings you quite far compared to basically any country except the US and China.

Note that there are also legal issues. The German army is the parliaments army, and as such the Bundestag must approve any mission that requires deployment outside German territory (NATO missions and EU missions are somewhat privileged). That would hinder foreign deployments of a joint European army.

EU army means French army, since it's the sole remaining global power. And for us, EU Citizens, that would be a very good move, but the biggest real barrier is linguistic and even with social willingness (almost present even if, of course, does not emerge on mass media) and political willingness (not present almost at all) such barrier can't be solved.

My own personal view is a smaller EU:

- France

- Spain

- Italy (too tied to NATO due to WWII past, but less than Germany)

- Portugal

- then Germany (too tied to NATO due to WWII past)

That form a new core EU in fiscal terms (even if all those countries are different real differences are limited), then in political terms with "cross-border parties", then in military terms like a small scale NATO lead by France. The the rest, smaller western countries can only follow, northern part who now talk out loud but in real terms can't live alone would have no choice but follow. UK can't do much now, with "the Commonwealth crisis" and the domestic intra-UK crisis there isn't much room to maneuver. Russia would not like that, of course, but between China (a historic enemy and still not really friendly and much interested in Russian eastern land) and a really united EU they'll jump the ship quickly: most of their infra, the tech they need is in the west and EU mutually need Russian resources instead of just tapping them giving back only industrial mass production.

It's really unlikely but our best interest.

> Russia would not like that

Oh, how much Russia would love that. A smaller EU? Are you kidding? Any day of the week, twice on Sunday.

A united EU, for real and not of small states but the major EU powers, France the seventh world power, Germany a big economic power, Italy the third EU manufacturing power, actually the base of much of Germany and France tech together, Spain and Portugal still very important view their links to South America. For Russia means having a nascent new old global power no one can stop. Remember: until WWI big western European powers was the world leading superpowers. Russia back then was a fragile empire and USA a marginal and local-only power like China.

We still have the most advanced tech and the biggest hi quality industrial complex both USA and China can't really rival except on scale.

yes but only via NATO, a US dominated military alliance.

The UK has consistently opposed the creation of the EU army, as well as opposed unified foreign policy etc.

It would have been hard, before the Ukraine invasion, to understand what goals of a unified foreign policy would be, or how the EU army would meet those goals. Now, post-invasion, there is a more common appreciation of how things are, but still early to say that there is going to be a coherent EU policy when the immediacy of the danger is past.

> It would have been hard, before the Ukraine invasion, to understand what goals of a unified foreign policy would be

Many in France and Germany could understand it very well. The UK generally resisted EU integration, including currency and foriegn policy, and of course the UK eventually left.

France and Germany are two countries in the EU, there are others with different views. They differ on quite a few foreign policy issues.

Poland and Germany, for example have very differing views on what priorities are for security policy in Europe. France and Germany have very different ideas on what priorities are for dealing with China.

“Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least 500 years: to create a disunited Europe.”

"Yes, minister" and "yes, prime minister" are incredibly fun and still very actual shows.

Comments like this make me wonder what the point is of posting links like this on HN. Most people here seem to generally be clueless about geopolitics, history and military.

Comments like this make me wonder what the point is of posting comments like this on HN. They're just shitting on the parent comment without any substance.

The far bigger issue is that France and Germany (especially Germany) have a chronic underspending problem on their military. They choose to spend on social programs instead. You can't claim leadership of a pan-EU army when you yourself don't even meet the 2% GDP spending target set by NATO.

In 2020, German spent about 53 billion USD on its military, that’s rank 7 world-wide. The UK spent 59 billion, about the same ballpark. The bigger problem in Germany is inefficient spending.

Using absolute numbers borders on fraud. What's the %?

Why care about the %? What really matters are the capabilities, no matter the cost.

Correct, but if Germany wants to be a leader of a pan-EU army it needs to be a dominant military power in the region (for example the US globally, or Turkey in the East Mediterranean, or what Egypt/Libya used to be in the Middle East before the US decided to regime change them). Else you just get political squabbling because the various states have equal power and nothing gets done.

I'm not saying social spending is bad, just that if playing a lead role in a pan-EU army is Germany's interest then it needs to spend more.

How will more money fix the fundamental issue of inefficient spending? It will just be more money inefficiently spent.

The bulk of the German military hasn't been combat effective for a long time, and is basically just a government jobs program.

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-cant-explain-use-broomstick...

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2017/10/20/all-of-germanys...

https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jet...

It's going to take a while to rebuild into an organization capable of actually fighting.

Did you read the first article?

That broomstick example gets paraded around a lot, but this was on a vehicle, that wasn't supposed to have a gun in the first place.

There is a lot of valid criticism on the readiness of Germany's armed forces, this isn't one.

You've made this comment twice - I am curious. Which configuration of the Boxer was it that was in the exercise without the weapon. I believe that the ambulance doesn't have one - which one was the German crew on?

arguably those two are linked - you can rationalise that French / German govt have been reluctant to spend on military force over which they have less influence than they would prefer. Hence the arguments for an EU army, despite the existence of NATO. We will see what happens with the German U-turn on military spending whether this results in them falling into line alongside the Brits in NATO, or closer the French in a EU military force. I suspect it will now be the former, given the loss of leverage the Germans now have

You greatly understate EU defense dominance. Ship building, subs, tanks, semi-autonomous weapons, small arms, self-propelled artillery, etc., are all areas where EU member states meet or well exceed US/UK weapons exports, particularly Germany and France. Although not an EU member, Turkey is increasingly becoming a player in the drone, small arms and missile space. Its easy to confuse high profile programs like the the F35 with the much greater volume of other categories of arms.

You can add aircraft (yes, there's no equivalent for the F-22 and F-35 but both don't form the backbone of the USAF yet and cost an outrageous amount of money), and helicopters, rockets, radar/sonar, combat systems (Thales is a world leader in that sphere) to that list.

Maybe EU should keep some weapons for itself, instead of exporting everything:

2015: Germany’s army is so under-equipped that it used broomsticks instead of machine guns in an exercise

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19...

As commented below:

That broomstick example gets paraded around a lot, but this was on a vehicle that wasn't supposed to have a gun in the first place.

There is a lot of valid criticism on the readiness of Germany's armed forces, this isn't one.

> Maybe EU should keep some weapons for itself, instead of exporting everything:

They got the message. IIRC, Germany's going to throw something like the equivalent of two years worth of extra defense spending at addressing its military under-funding problems, plus actually meeting its NATO obligation of 2% GDP in defense spending in the future. IIRC, there was even talk about making that a constitutional requirement as well.

That's what happen now, thanks to a big and powerful propaganda, but skyrocketing inflation (not really caused by Ukrainian war, and many know that) and decade long social degradation have put many on the brink of a civil war. Actually propaganda win, but can't do that for long.

That means that's unlikely but not that unlikely that a big EU State (France, for instance) elect a new government that decide it's about time to exit NATO and propose a strategic partnership to Russia. It was about to happen and it was stopped by Eastern European countries just few months ago, it can came back quickly.

Actually both USA and Russia prefer a not-really-united EU but EU Citizens are already united enough and since crisis bite things can change rapidly. At that point classic repression will fail and tentative to ride the unrest in different directions might not succeed. Italy and Germany are well subjugated by NATO, France is not, few other EU countries are middle-ground since they can't simply act alone.

Re-orienting energy dependency is just an economic move: it's impossible to live on GNL shipping, it's impossible to complete the Green New Deal quick enough, the sole answer is keep and expand nuclear and only States have resources to do so, that means cutting out neoliberals who rule the energy. Even pushing renewable at maximum speed can't really work: it can work with new single-family homes, well placed, EU population density and actual civil structures are incompatible, dense cities can't have buildings re-made to be A-class quickly, electricity grid can't be re-made quickly etc hydro power can be added quickly but States who can orographically already have a significant slice of hydro and can't add much more, similarly we can't all change vehicles quickly. GNLs can't arrive quickly and being properly integrated in actual networks. That's why the EU without much advertisement continue to purchase Russian gas as usual. A change can happen in 7-8 years, perhaps hardly in 5-6 years, not quicker than that. And that's not just energy, too many EU countries depend on other natural resources from Russia and can't substitute them on-the-spot.

man you sure point too many things, back none, and just mix everything into goulash that doesn't make much sense (apart from outright lies which are also too many to actually discuss properly here)

For some reasons unknown to me my comment got deleted, perhaps because I'm more or less say that you are a conformist (witch is not really an insult, IMVHO anyway), so I try again in a different sauce: try to read the 1929 press. For most everything was ok or ok-ish at least and the few who say something is deeply broken just make a soup of different and not really connected things. The we know what happen.

That's the goulash. We can just wait and see. Personally I expect a new global war for resources and economic reasons and I expect hi tech gears will be of no help to win it, witch is unfortunate for us westerners because while we have hi tech gears and also nukes we largely miss a mass of young, loyal and desperate army that having nothing to loose just fight with the maximum effort to the death...

> Putin's invasion of Ukraine quickly shut that window. With the Germans now re-orientating their energy dependency from Russia to the US, as well as committing to buying billions of dollars worth of US military hardware, there is no chance of any 'EU led third way'

I think that's backward: European defense independence was limited by funding; they talked about it but didn't invest in it. The Russian attack on Ukraine spurred Germany especially to fund defense; to think of the possibilities, Germany's GDP is about $4.2 trillion, Russia's is only $1.6 trillion [0]. Germany's military alone could easily far oustrip Russia's[1]. Germany's economy is 4th largest in the world, meaning they could build the 4th largest military - beyond a doubt they have the political, technological, and industrial capability. Add to that France, Italy, etc: The EU's total GDP is around $17 trillion.

Autonomy doesn't mean having no external dependencies. Only North Korea tries that intentionally, and you can see the results. Forcing countries like Russia and Iran to have no external dependencies is considered a severe punishment. Dependencies on allies is not only fine, it makes things far more efficient, which means you can afford far more military power and economic influence. Nobody can compete without friends.

[0] To consider the enormous impact of GDP on defense, the US spends the equivalent of 50% of Russia's entire GDP on defense. For comparison, the target number for NATO is 2% of GDP.

[1] Not an idle curiosity: Germany's enormous economy, relative even to Western European countries (the UK's and France's are about $3 trillion), makes Germany an eternal potential geopolitical threat, and is part of the reason for two world wars. That's one of the main original reasons for the EU and NATO - to keep Germany in the fold.

Please dip their share price once again, missed the opportunity three weeks ago. Thank you, internet. BTW if any European corporation says "cloud", from distance it smells with Deutsche Telekom and EU funds.

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