No. of Recommendations: 12
You can't point to budget increases that happened in the last 12-24 months and claim they've been dedicated members of NATO, sorry.The figures I first posted upthread were from
2015. Combined defense expenditures even before Trump took office were well north of $200 billion annually.
You mean like this? France's Army is 45% smaller than it was in 1989.Yeah, and the Soviet Red Army was 4x bigger than it is today back in 1989, also.
And once more you're picking out a single country, rather than looking at Europe collectively. So here's the same chart, but this time for all of Europe - and you can see that their active duty military has
more personnel than the United States!
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countri...None of this supports what you're trying to imply - that EU isn't devoting massive amounts of resources to its own national defense. That's simply false. They've got more troops than the U.S. does globally - and while they don't match our global expenditures (no country on earth does), their expenditures of more than $200 billion per year mean that they're spending more in defending Europe than we are.
Again, the notion that the defense of Europe is proceeding almost entirely on the U.S.' dime is just flat out wrong.
Since it's the latter, how do you think that stuff gets to them? Is it all flown in?No, but Europe's got a pretty solid industrial base. If they moved to a wartime footing, their own domestic resources and industrial/manufacturing capability would be pretty sizable against an invading force. And again, Europe's got the same size navy and roughly the same number of subs that Russia has - so they're on equal footing in terms of naval warfare, with both Russia and Europe having the ability to project power at sea. Since NATO
also includes the US and Canada, any supply lines coming across the Atlantic would also have the benefit of US and Canadian naval support - and if you want to add in the Aussie naval fleet (they're a member too!), they've got the 15th largest navy in the world.
Again, no one disputes that European military power isn't the size of that of the U.S. No one's is. Or even that there exists an argument that Europe could spend some more on defense. Just that your argument that European military expenditures are tiny is flat-out wrong. Collectively, the military forces of Europe are pretty enormous - probably the second or third largest in the world, behind only the U.S. and (perhaps) China.
