No. of Recommendations: 9
Then where is the money going? 0 submarines. Barely 100 tanks.
The money is being spent on the military.
You keep looking at just Germany. The combined countries of Europe have between them about 5,000 tanks, give or take (though that's pre-Ukraine; I expect some have been sold to them). That's roughly the same number that the U.S. has.
The EU nations also have about 1.9 million active-duty personnel combined. That's also sizably larger than the U.S.
NATO Navies don't really exist; there's the US Navy - woefully undersized for what it needs to do - and nobody else.
Again, the U.S. is part of NATO. European countries don't have naval forces that are sizable relative to the U.S., for the obvious reason that Russia is cursed by geography.
Okay - that doesn't really make it obvious. But the reason that European military forces look the way they do - the reason that European history looks the way it does - is because of geography. Russia doesn't have access to an ice-free naval base to support a blue-water navy, and the entire western border is connected to all the countries of Europe by the Great European plain. If the Carpathian Mountains went all the way to the Baltic Sea, then European history would be very very different. But it doesn't. It's basically flat as a bowling alley from Brest on the Atlantic to Moscow.
What that means is that Russia does not, and never will, have much of a navy to speak of - but they always will have a massive army on their Western Front, because there is zero geography to protect them from invasion from the West. And that's why Europe's defenses don't really have a major naval component, and why their tank divisions are mostly in Poland (because the Carpathians basically channel any mechanized divisions through Poland if they want to reach Europe).
If you tell me that you think Europe should be spending more money on defense, there's certainly merit to that position. If you tell me that Europe isn't contributing at all to their defense, that's simply false.
