I think the administration is gambling on being able to consolidate global power before anyone is going to have a chance to build anything. Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight. Decades ago in my early career I briefly worked on some logistics software for the Joint Strike Fighter project and had some contact with a couple of the army of contractors working on the project. The scale and complexity of this effort blows away anything else I've ever seen in my career, which includes a number of multi-billion dollar infrastructure and nuclear power projects.
Trump talks about invading Canada or Greenland and people act like it is a joke. I don't think it is.
The US is in a position to completely dictate to Europe what they will or won't do, using Russia as a proxy for now. We are 48 days in. A couple of weeks ago I replied to someone suggesting the US could provide weapons to Russia with disbelief. I no longer consider that an impossible scenario. Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia. I mean that's a relatively tame response compared to the options on the table.
Right now the only chance for Europe is to stop this madness in the US. We have this "take it down" act, the executive order to produce a report advising whether or not to declare martial law, the January 6th pardon of the Proud Boys who are now effectively a paramilitary force of thousands waiting for Trump to deploy. These are all familiar elements in history and I think we are in for a bloody, bloody summer. I think we're going to see government forces opening fire on protesters, martial law declared, and the implementation of Chinese style suppression and crackdown on dissent online. Maybe attempts to strip US citizens of their citizenship and "deport" them for good measure, anything to try to sow fear into average people to not step out of line. If the administration is successful in quashing the opposition and getting everyone to go back to work, Europe could easily next on the chopping block. Remember all the things Bannon said about the EU during the first administration.
>Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia.
Actually Europe would stop supplying components for the F-35's so the US would not be able to build any more or keep the ones they have working, let alone sell them to Russia. Russia would never buy them anyway, how could they trust that the next US president wouldn't pull the plug on spare parts? Would they trust that Trump is going to become dictator for life? (And what happens after he dies?) Russia has their own fighters that may not be quite as capable in some ways, but are good enough. Russia sells jet fighters themselves, they do not buy them.
>Europe is completely reliant on the US and US technology for defense right now, these systems took decades and trillions of dollars to build and refine, and an 800 billion EUR investment does not magically create a military industrial complex overnight.
Europe already has a large local military industrial complex. Half of what Ukraine has received has come from Europe. They would only have to expand what they have, not develop new technologies, except perhaps for a replacement for the Patriot missile system. They'd get a boost from converting their existing factories from building US weapons components to building EU weapons components as well.
I'm actually surprised that the US military industrial complex (MIC) is not screaming bloody murder about some of this. They stand to lose sales of replacement weapons for those sent to Ukraine, to lose support contracts for F-16's, and to lose a whole lot more if the US pulls out of NATO. Even if the US does not pull out of NATO, the NATO countries have already started investing in their own defense industries, which is going to severely cut into US MIC profits. They should be terrified.
The US has so many options to bully Europe. What about turning off cloud providers and other services like word, excel etc. Or restricting hardware like GPUs or other consumer stuff. There are a thousand options to bring europe to its knees. And there is nothing Europe could do.
ASML acquired Cymer in 2013 to accelerate the development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) semiconductor lithography. Based in San Diego, California, Cymer was founded in 1986 by two college friends Robert Akins and Richard Sandstrom to develop laser and lithography light source technology for the semiconductor industry.
I can't imagine whatever Cymer is doing is completely hidden from the parent company and that it's non-replicatable anywhere else in the world?
Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
There has been zero reason given for this attack on Europe.
>I can't imagine whatever Cymer is doing is completely hidden from the parent company and that it's non-replicatable anywhere else in the world?
I mean this is technology that is not in textbooks and is so specialized that China of all groups have yet to replicate it and have been trying like its life or death(because it is).
>Maybe there is some way the IP is blocked from ASML on national security grounds or something, I don't know, but what I do know, is their mutual destruction for the sake of some crusade against something ridiculous like "the woke mind virus" is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
The technology was originally developed by the US Research labs. The acquisition was only approved by the US government given certain stipulations: namely the US can tell the Dutch to do whatever they want when it comes to chip tech using their research. Thats why when the US phones up the Dutch to block sales to China, they dutifully complied. I would argue that it is pretty reasonable. The US put in the effort to develop these innovations, then gave up the freedom to commercialize it (to the complaints of some US politicians) because the Dutch had other necessary components ready to go.
It remains to be seen how the Dutch will now react given current realities but im sure there is a lot the US government can do to damage ASML if it came to that so surely that much be in the calculations.
SAMP/T exists and is allegedly better than Patriot.
I don't think there are any particular weapon types for which there is no qualified European alternative. Very many systems are however designed around some amount of American components. Even if there are locally produced, reasonably equivalent versions of those components, you can't just swap them out without major redesign work.
For example the license-manifactured jet engines used in the Saab 39 Gripen. If Trump/Musk pulls the plug on support for those, it will be an epic headache to rebuild around some other engine. Not quite designing a new plane from scratch, but very major rework.
> I don't think there are any particular weapon types for which there is no qualified European alternative.
Strategic bombers and fifth-generation multi-role aircraft are definitely missing. You could maybe convert A400Ms using a Rapid-Dragon style system into an adequate B-52/Tu-95/H-6N-like bomber, but it wouldn't be a modern penetration bomber like the B-1 and certainly not like the B-2 or B-21. The arguably best European fighter is the French 4.5+ gen Rafale. It's damn good but lacks the stealth of the F-22 and J-10, and the sensor fusion of the F-35.
Maybe also add heavy-lift helicopters, I don't think Europe produces anything in the class of the CH-53/CH-46 and definitely not the Mi-26, but a good-enough big heli is a much easier engineering problem compared to the other two aforementioned equipment categories.
Stealth is losing its effectiveness with new VHF targeting radars that can track stealth aircraft. Maybe EU sensor fusion algorithms are not as advanced as in the F-35? They certainly must have some kind of sensor fusion algorithms, if just to create coherent cockpit displays of what is going on in an airspace. Maybe they lack cooperative sensor fusion across multiple aircraft? Are bombers still effective any more? I know they are being used by Russia to launch stand-off weapons, but isn't a long range missile as good as or better than having a bomber? Maybe the modern way to think of a bomber is as a reusable missile first stage so the missiles can be smaller and cheaper. Actually flying bombers over cities/bases and dropping bombs no longer happens, does it? Stealth in a bomber buys you nothing if the bomber is directly above you because the cross section becomes enormous. Maybe precision glide-bombs are cheaper than surface to surface missiles. I think if an army had a choice they'd rather have many S-S missiles rather than many glide bombs and a few bombers. The missiles would be much more versatile, as long as they had enough of them.
I have yet to see a good analysis of the tradeoffs between big expensive weapons and many cheap drone weapons. It seems possible that very soon the big expensive weapons will be seen as too expensive and less capable. Ukraine is making millions of drones, maybe when the are making tens of millions they'll care less about conventional weapons. Seems like making lots of drones could help the EU scale up quickly without a lot of research and at lower cost.
Yes the US may have a second civil war coming. The good guys won the last one; they should win this one too, but it may take some time. In the end though they should go for a "reconciliation"; MAGA will show no mercy -- the good guys shouldn't either.
70% of the country is fat/obese. If its going to happen, it might end up looking comical: angry people of walmart riding around in their scooters then deciding to go back home: this civil war stuff is too much effort, whats on Netflix?
This might be the most delusional comment I’ve ever seen on HN. Crackdown on dissent online? That’s the explicit policy of our “democratic” European “allies” that the Vice President openly criticized in Munich. Opening fire on protestors? What protestors? And this talk of a thousands-strong Proud Boys “paramilitary” is paranoid nonsense.
There have been street protests here in Montana (red state) already (because he fired large numbers of national park and forest service employees and said any foreign students who made online comments supporting Palestinians should be deported).
Well I hope you are right. All of those things were already either done or tried by Trump during his last term. The trajectory is leading towards further escalation.
The protests will escalate in the summer, when the weather is warmer, more time has passed for awareness of what is happening to soak in, and students are on school break.
Trump talks about invading Canada or Greenland and people act like it is a joke. I don't think it is.
The US is in a position to completely dictate to Europe what they will or won't do, using Russia as a proxy for now. We are 48 days in. A couple of weeks ago I replied to someone suggesting the US could provide weapons to Russia with disbelief. I no longer consider that an impossible scenario. Europe stops buying F35s? Trump tells Europe that if they don't buy them he's going to sell them to Russia. I mean that's a relatively tame response compared to the options on the table.
Right now the only chance for Europe is to stop this madness in the US. We have this "take it down" act, the executive order to produce a report advising whether or not to declare martial law, the January 6th pardon of the Proud Boys who are now effectively a paramilitary force of thousands waiting for Trump to deploy. These are all familiar elements in history and I think we are in for a bloody, bloody summer. I think we're going to see government forces opening fire on protesters, martial law declared, and the implementation of Chinese style suppression and crackdown on dissent online. Maybe attempts to strip US citizens of their citizenship and "deport" them for good measure, anything to try to sow fear into average people to not step out of line. If the administration is successful in quashing the opposition and getting everyone to go back to work, Europe could easily next on the chopping block. Remember all the things Bannon said about the EU during the first administration.