The costs of living without the USA?
Every time someone comes out asking that the EU become militarily independent, the explanation arrives "well, look, so you have to raise military spending". Which isn't necessarily true. Or rather, it is only true if we want to follow the same policy as the USA.
Let's take the EU for example. It is impossible for political reasons, but let us also assume that all the armies can be joined together into one army. With the current set-up, the result is surprising: a quantity of personnel and forces would be obtained which would make the European Union capable of defending itself.
Now the experts will come to say that no, it would be a globally weaker army than the US one, but they forget one thing. The US Army is an offensive type army, that is, an army made to harm others, but not necessarily to defend the USA, since they risk little in geographical terms.
When planning an assault, or planning a war, generally the attacker already takes into account the loss of 3 men for each killed defender, because most people know that defending is easier than attacking.
Now, if the question is: would the European forces, all together, be sufficient to defend the EU in a defensive situation? The answer is yes. If the question is: would current forces be sufficient to maintain an offensive machine like the USA? Then the answer is “NO”.
But the problem is not even sufficiency: if we united all the EU armies we would find ourselves in a situation of extreme redundancy, that is, we would have a great many infrastructures which would be doubled, tripled, n-duplicated. Of course, perhaps a single command would be too simple, but a command for eastern Europe, one for the south, one for the north, etc., would certainly not reach the number of commands/staffs of today.
It is by no means obvious that having a single army for the whole EU would be more expensive than today. It would be more expensive ONLY by accepting the idea of an aggressive policy like the American one, or of an EU that follows the USA in their "muscular" policy.
The legend of 2% of GDP is an invention of the lobby of US arms manufacturers: it is a number that it is not clear where it comes from, but to make matters worse it is assumed that this money is spent on American arms.
The Americans say they want more armed NATO countries, but ONLY if they buy weapons from them. If that 2% is spent on local industry (like the French or Germans and in some ways also Italy) or on non-American industries (like the Poles who are arming themselves in South Korea), then you won't hear the applause of Washington, not even when Polish spending is raised to 4%.
And to explain this concept even better, I want to mention something that is rarely talked about.
The Italian MILITARY nuclear program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_nuclear_weapons_program
Few know that Italy had a military program to produce nuclear weapons. Little is said about it because in reality it shows the duplicity of the American ally.
For the first ten years after the war there was no talk of nuclear weapons. Moreover, bans of this kind were not exceptions: the USA remained very firm, for the entire 50 possible years on treaties, on the principle whereby Italy should not possess aircraft carriers (a principle which was part of a certain rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force). .
So, first the Italians asked the USA to leave nuclear missiles on Italian territory to slow down the Soviet bloc in Friuli. The USA complies, but after one or two years they withdraw everything.
Then, together with the Americans, they try to produce a European nuclear potential by bringing together France, Germany and Italy. But the English hesitations and the French grandeur cause the project to fail, and that only France has the atomic bomb.
At that point Italy began with its own nuclear program. An “Alfa” missile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_(rocket)) was designed and tested, which was also the first SLCB to be launched from a ship (the then Cruiser Garibaldi), and the the Italian government had already bought the centrifuges and is about to give the order to enrich the plutonium.
Then you will say: damn, but the USA will be very happy, given that in this way we would have been less dependent and we would not have been a "latch bolt" on NATO defense. Aha.
Too bad that the USA at that point put all the pressure possible to offer their atomic weapons, even with a "Dual Key" type formula.
This story of the US not being satisfied that European countries are trailing and depending on them for defense, or that we are too dependent on the US, is political bullshit. When Italy wanted to be strategically independent, building nuclear power, the Americans told us "flab"
And of these "flab" I could list many others, starting from the artificial division between Lagunari and San Marco, passing through the closure (supported by Washington after the American events in Somalia) of the Wolves of Tuscany, from the obstinacy in keeping alive for fifty 'years a treaty that forbids Italy to have aircraft carriers, etc.
The US doesn't care that allies are LESS dependent on them, the US cares that they buy more weapons from them. The rest is Rampini's crap.
You can also guess it from a simple fact: is 2% of military spending really military spending when we know that it would all end up in the hands of Finmeccanica, Leonardo or Beretta for Italy, Rheinmetall or H&K in Germany, Dassault and others in France? Obviously not, because the shopping, ending up in the hands of local companies, actually helps the local economy.
If there are any hesitations in reaching 2% military spending, that is, it is certainly not because governments are not eager to finance their own industry: the problem is that this request comes with the clause that all that money is spent on American weapons.
For this reason, when I am offered this dialectic of lazy and pacifist European countries that do not want to increase military spending and remain on a US leash, I personally react with a shrug.