European defense, fantastic animals and where to find them.
First, I noticed that several newspapers are trying to debunk the thesis that the entry into the NATO of UKraina has unnerved Putin, and that in the Baltic the situation is the same.
Good. Since they have a higher firepower than mine, all that blablabla does nothing but oppose one thing:
A map. Look at where Ukraine is in relation to Moscow, and then look at where Finland and Sweden are in relation to St. Petersburg.
If, in your opinion, those cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) would be defensible after installing NATO missiles in Ukraine (or Finland), then I am selling an old stadium to be renovated in the center of Rome.
I don't need to debunk anything – the map is clear. If you want, you can debunk the map. But Ukraine does not move from there.
That said, we can get to the point. Apparently Scholz after announcing an increase in the military budget of 100 billion, said today that between F-18, Rafale and F-35, Germany will buy F-35s.
Nice, Everyone now hails this German "awakening" as the beginning of a new "European defense", but you will have heard of it: there was a French-German consortium to produce a new sixth generation aircraft, for now called FCAS. And the French Rafale was also at stake in the contract, for the fifth generation, which so far has shown that it actually does what it claims to be able to do.
How, then, does the decision to buy F-35 from the US go in the direction of a European defense independent of the US?
This is what I mean when we say that too much rhetoric is being made about the "newfound European unity": by buying F-35s from the USA instead of the Rafales from the French, the Germans are saying that yes, they are making a strong defense, but “They don't think European”. Otherwise they would have bought French.
We will see how many weapons the Germans will buy from the US, how many from European allies, and how many they will make at home. But what I expect is that in the end they will buy a few important things from the US, and the rest they will do at home. The story of the F-35 is quite premonitory.
There is also a lot of hypocrisy on the issue of 2%. The US has never insisted that the European armies be stronger. On the contrary, they have always worked against: they applied to the letter the treaty that prevented Italy from having aircraft carriers for 50 years, they lobbied to reduce the number of Alpine troops, they lobbied for the lagoon and San Marco to go down to the ridiculous level of 600 men, only to go back up recently. They pressured for the Wolves of Tuscany to be dissolved, and so on.
Because the American is interested in selling weapons: all the money to pay the soldiers, officers and non-commissioned officers, changes nothing for them. They want to see arms purchases, not armies marching.
The two percent level of spending for the US does not at all mean that more staff will need to be hired. The US does not sell staff. It means we need to buy more weapons from them.
Also in this case, therefore, it is necessary to understand how much will go into the personnel and how much into the weapons.
There is then again talk of a tactical nuclear war. But even Putin stopped naming her all the time, for a reason. He can't do it.
I don't know who said that a nuclear war is easy to wage, or easier. Many think that if we take conventional warfare and add tactical nuclear weapons to it, then warfare is simpler.
On the contrary, it is even more complex: we need even better logistics, much higher speed, perfect communications, professional soldiers, something that is the opposite of what we have seen in the field.
Putin threatening to switch to theater nuclear weapons is like someone saying “yes, I can't lift 10 kg, but I can lift 70 when I want”. For real? We know well that's not the case.
I really enjoy the Kaspersky story. Because the Chinese of Huawei have banned themselves without ever having a shred of proof of their "espionage", and then we discover that half the Public Administration, in Europe, has an antivirus written by a Russian, a former agent of the Russian secret services (it is official, he also confirmed it).
But don't you feel like balls?