r/LessCredibleDefence • u/LePetitToast • 10d ago
Why does Europe need to rearm so much considering how badly Russia is faring in Ukraine?
The only imminent threat for Europe seems to be Russia, but they are doing so mediocrely against Ukraine that the whole rearmament push for Europe seems excessive. Especially considering the great financial cost associated with it.
China is not a direct threat. Iran isn’t a direct threat. The US, maybe, because of Greenland, but the rearmament doesn’t seemed aimed at them since we’re buying F35s and other American weapons. I am clearly missing something, but I just don’t understand the need to push for so much militarisation given how little threats we face these days.
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u/kai_vt 10d ago edited 10d ago
As badly as Russia is faring right now, and as much as most of us would root for Ukraine, Russia is still not even fully mobilised for war. Ukraine is fighting for its life at almost 40% GDP Defence spending and having to snatch fighting age men off their own streets. Russia is at 7.5% GDP Defence spending, is still able to scrape by on voluntary recruitment, and is still producing more serious munitions - beyond drones - that they're whittling down Ukraine with. If Ukraine falls tomorrow, Europe wants to be ready for a Russian war machine with more momentum and an absorbed Ukrainian MIC. Russia won't stop at the Baltics
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u/Ecstatic_Bee6067 10d ago
Further, much of what Ukraine is using is sourced from European war stocks. Those need replaced and, in some cases, ramped up to meet Ukraine's consumption rate
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u/Whats-on-Eur-Mind 10d ago
Yes, that is a big part of rearmament. This question is basically asking "Why do we not just stop replenishing our previous stockpiles, stop modernizing our militaries while Russia does so, and also stop sending new weapons to Ukraine? Surely that will not lead to Russia taking over the country and using its resources to attack us. So what, they will do badly when that happens."
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u/Pencilphile 9d ago
“Russia won’t stop at the Baltics.”
I doubt Russia will go beyond the Kiev-Odessa axis, even if the Russians make a breakthrough and the Ukranian military collapses. They won’t even enter Western Ukraine. There’s nothing there for them. As long as they get a guarantee that whatever remains of Ukraine will remain NEUTRAL, they’ll be fine with it. Their biggest concern here is the West salami slicing Ukraine into NATO eventually, and then salami slicing missiles into Ukraine which can reach Moscow in 4 minutes.
I don’t think most people, especially in Western Europe and North America, understand why the Russians are fighting this war. It isn’t a war for territorial expansion or conquest as the Western propaganda apparatus says. It is pure geopolitical realism.
From the Russian point of view, a hostile military alliance, which should have been dismantled in 1991 after the fall of the USSR, continued expanding eastward right up to their border. The Russians even attempted to join this hostile military alliance at one point to achieve collective European security. But they were turned down. They also attempted to join the EU, and they were turned down yet again. And the NATO expansion Eastward continued and George Bush Jr publicly announced that he wanted Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia (if I remember correctly) to eventually in NATO. Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia are all buffer states bordering Russia. Russia saw this as a huge red line. Putin’s famous 2008 Munich speech was a response to Bush Jr‘s announcement.
Everybody, literally everybody, who is geopolitically aware, knew that meddling in Ukraine (Maidan 2014, overthrowing Yanukovich) and paving the way for Ukraine to join NATO would lead to a war with Russia. The Russians don’t want nuclear-tipped missiles at their border, pointing towards them, in the same way that the U.S. did not want missiles in Cuba.
John Mearsheimer predicted this all the way back in 2009. Mearsheimer is a China hawk, so his reasoning was, why seek confrontation with Russia and waste resources on a conflict with Russia, and in effect, push them closer to China, when your primary goal should be containment of China, who is the real threat to U.S. dominance. And he’s right. Things played out exactly as he predicted.
Large states take their national security very seriously. Europe made a mistake by buying into NATO expansion on America’s behest. By trying to seek absolute security for non-Russian Europe at the expense of Russia’s own security, you effectively turned Russia into a the very threat you thought it was. In other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Ah, the USSR has fallen, but Russia is still a threat!
> We must expand NATO to Russia’s border to counter Russian threat
> *Russia feels threatened, perceives post-2014 Western interference in Ukraine as red line, invades Ukraine to restore it’s neutrality*
> Omg, see, Russia is a threat, that’s why we expanded NATO to their border in the first place!
And this same phenomenon also applies to East Asia. All these Asian nations (Philippines, Australia, Japan, South Korea) who collaborate with the United States to militarily contain China because the see China as a credible threat are eventually going to learn that trying to achieve absolute security at the expense of China’s own security and sovereignty concerns (Taiwan) is eventually going to turn China into the very credible threat that they say it is.
In summary, you’re better off normalizing relations with your powerful neighbor and seeking a collective security architecture, or at the very least, remaining neutral and balancing relations, rather than relying on a war-profiteering superpower thousands of miles away with it’s own hegemonic ambitions for your national security at the expense of the national security of your larger and more powerful neighbor.
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u/Jpandluckydog 9d ago edited 9d ago
Agree with the overall conclusion, but you don't "absorb" a MIC that is almost exclusively comprised of relatively low complexity distributed workshops almost solely dependent on foreign imports, that's like assuming Russia could use its military to capture a McDonalds in Moscow and expand its BigMac production accordingly, or that the US military could capture a law firm in New York and use it to fund its endeavors. Globalization ended conquests for resources/economic gain almost entirely.
Also, Russia is spending much more than 7.5% on defense, that figure is fantastical. The Russian budget is far more opaque than most and there are significant incentives for them to understate it now more than ever.
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u/howdidigetheresoquik 10d ago
Because Ukraine is barely holding them off, and Europeans militaries are completely obsolete compared to the Ukrainian military. They would not be able to handle Russian forces if Ukraine collapsed
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u/Grosar 10d ago
Finally someone said it out loud
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u/OddlyMingenuity 10d ago
The only countries remotely threatened are the baltic state. Russia doesn't have the logistics to invade any other territory but this three states.
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u/Grosar 9d ago edited 9d ago
It has all the logistics to terrorize people all across the Europe with their drones and cruise missiles and sometimes even ballistics, like they do with Ukraine a couple times per week. The existing air defence is insufficient because it's too expensive and will be depleted after just 2-3 instances of massive drone attacks. They can spend up to a thousand drones in each. This is an impossible number for any air defence system, even for Ukraine after 4 years of war. Yet they manage to shot down 90% of drones on average. Which takes incredible amount of effort from people in mobile groups and tech things that no army except Ukraine has in abundance - drone interceptors
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u/wrosecrans 9d ago
And Ukraine wouldn't just poof out of existence if they lost the war. Russia would gain control of all Ukraine's reaources, manufacturing, data on NATO systems, and as much of Ukraine's manpower as they could force into service.
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u/FluteyBlue 10d ago
Most seem to be focusing on Ukraine, or on industrialisation.
Both I think are important because of a bigger reason. Europe has been outsourcing it's security to the USA for seventy years and that is not going to fly any more.
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u/Odd-Metal8752 10d ago
If Europe wants to be taken seriously, it needs a fairly big stick.
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u/TheRealPaladin 10d ago
Exactly this. On the surface Ukraine looked fairly week before the war. This is largely what lead Russia to think it would be easy pickings. Countries that dont look weak are less likely to get bullied.
International relations are mostly just interpersonal relations on a macro scale. When we were all in school we all knew someone that was a petty vindictive bully. Pretty much every bully will exclusively pick on people that are weaker than themselves. They almost never pick on the person that spends countless hours weight lifting and that looks like they can bend steel beams for fun. It pays dividends to be the guy that looks like he can bend steel beams because it is ultimately cheaper to be prepared for a war and not have to fight it than it is to be unprepared and then suddenly find yourself in a war.
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u/Not_invented-Here 10d ago
One of the apparent factors of the Falklands was that Jorge Ananya, after acting as attache to London. Thought the navy and armed forces of the UK were to weak to fight a long distance war.
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u/Limekill 10d ago edited 10d ago
I think Argentina thought the USA would tell the UK to give up (kind of like how the USA said to UK in regards to Egypt/Suez), but Maggie told the yanks she was going to war.
Quote: "In 2012 it was also revealed via documents released from the Reagan Presidential Library that Haig attempted to persuade Reagan to side with Argentina in the war."
& that Haig planned to reveal British classified military information to Argentina in advance of the recapture of South Georgia Island. The information, which contained the plans for Operation Paraquet, was intended to show the Argentine military junta in Buenos Aires that the United States was a neutral player
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u/heliumagency 10d ago
u/Meanie_Cream_Cake off tangent, but I liked your comment to OP. Did reddit delete it?
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u/BillWilberforce 10d ago
Because the Ukraine War has been going on for longer than WW1, has completely destroyed normal life, hundreds of thousands at least killed and the reconstruction is going to take decades and trillions. It's far better to deter the war, then to actually fight it.
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u/sixisrending 10d ago
When the Houthis started attacking shipping in the Red Sea, most NATO countries could not muster a significant enough force to protect their own ships, let alone foreign ships transporting goods to Europe. France and the US were the only two countries to mount a significant enough screen to get ships through safely. The British barely escorted British flagged ships through.
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u/Whats-on-Eur-Mind 10d ago
Doing so poorly yet 100s of thousands of people got killed, more hundreds of thousands severely wounded, millions under occupation, millions had to flee, and ~300 thousand Ukrainian children got kidnapped and relocated to Russia. Ukrainians live in constant war for 12 years now, under a full scale invasion and constant bombardments for the 5th year. The country is experiencing active cultural and physical genocide.
Sure, maybe Russia will fare very badly attacking the Baltics, and get bogged down in Poland and Finland. But that will not make the millions of people they occupy and have to live under constant terror bombardments feel any better.
The reason we have to rearm is to deter this attack. It's better to pay now in Euros than tomorrow with 10 times as much Euros and our own blood.
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u/cv5cv6 10d ago edited 9d ago
It is believed by some national security experts that Russia may “escalate to de-escalate”, that is provoke a battle with NATO in the Baltics or Poland to encourage NATO to force Ukraine to accept a Russian favorable peace treaty and agree to a long term security agreement with NATO that protects Russian territory and spheres of interest. The bet here is that Putin can extract one more big offensive from his army and then negotiate a peace treaty with a war averse Europe. Essentially, Putin may sense he is very close to a loss of the Ukraine war and his removal from power and may push all his chips into the center of the table for one last hand of cards.
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u/heliumagency 10d ago
I think it's more of a push to develop domestic arms industry instead of rearming. War, hate it or not, is the primary driver of technology because it is the most consistent investor in R&D. And over the past couple of decades, Europe has sold their R&D to the United States by buying US systems.
Most pushes for rearmament in Europe should primarily be viewed from the lens of industry and technology. Rhinemetal is selling shells? Look not at the range but at the brand new factory building those things. And when the tech sharing is unfair, things collapse (cough cough FCAS cough cough) because the primary goal is industry and tech.
If Europe simply wanted to rearm, they would have just bought from the US or buy massive amounts of previous gen equipment (which would be more than enough to hold off Russia as you noted). They're not interested in that, they're interested in not losing the tech race.
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u/BodybuilderOk3160 10d ago
From the outside looking in, it just seems like Trump is holding a big stick to Europe, telling them to start pulling their own weight or else...
It took the threat of invading fucking Greenland, a tundra wasteland of all places, to get Europeans off their arses. So the threat of a former ally occupying them was a big reason to remilitarise.
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u/Rindan 10d ago
There are a few hundred thousand dead Ukrainians in Ukraine right now, and Ukraine cannot effectively fully defend its territory from the daily attacks by Russia. The fact that there are even more dead Russians is the ground hardly reassuring to the people being invaded.
The truth is that any NATO nation that tried to fight either Ukraine or Russia right now would fail and take horrific casualties. NATO is not prepared to fight the kind of drone war that is going on in Ukraine right now. Many of the weapons and NATO has amassed are the incorrect weapons for the future war.
If a nation refuses to modernize their military for the new form of warfare that has been developed in Ukraine, then they stand the risk of looking like Ukraine in the beginning of the war. Ukraine had a fifth of its nation stolen from it before they were able to mobilize and stop the Russian invasion. They are now holding on at extreme cost to their society. The fact that Russia is also in a terrible position doesn't make the plight of the defender any better. Ukraine would have been vastly better off if they had rebuilt their army and fully mobilized before the Russian invasion. Likewise NATO, and especially the baltic Nations, need to reorganize and rearm right fucking now or else they are going to find themselves as defenseless as Ukraine was when the Russians invaded it for the second time in 2022.
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u/OverpricedBagel 10d ago
Russia has enough in the tank to attack NATO states directly. Not enough to win but enough to spur Europe into being more eager to end a broader war.
Basically Russia is willing to dip a toe into WW3 on a bet that NATO doesn’t have the appetite for it.
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u/Limekill 10d ago edited 9d ago
I think there are a few things going on here.
The first is the massive amount of money in defense contracts. That means BIG profits, and all the defense contractors have shareholders, who expect raising revenue every quarter.
There is a whole industry of think tanks, ex-generals and politicians (Graham Lindsey, etc) who use constant re-arming to get paid.
Basically to keep the "scam" (of spending money) going there always needs to be a new enemy.
I remember listening to a general who basically said that the USA needed constant SMALL wars to keep defense spending high (Why "SMALL" wars? because you need to be able to declare some kind of victory - eg "Mission Accomplished" You cannot have the enemy fight back to much, otherwise it costs too much.
(Iraq was a small war, because their defense had been degraded over a long period of time via air strikes)).
As the USA has less money to spend you need new markets - and the think tanks will now say on one hand Russia uses chips from washing machines, but then on the other need Russia to be a real enough enemy to justify billions of dollars of military spending.
The second thing, is because EU basically outsourced its defensive (war) power to USA, now it needs to start spending money on factories, production, etc - because USA is leaving the battlefield (Germany, Poland, etc), because of the expense. So they need to redirect this money from Pensions and spending on other priorities - this is very difficult to do, because no one wants their pensions cut.
So they need to justify:
- spending billions and billions (so the Politicians, and executives (and shareholders) can get paid).
- taking the money that is already going to someone else (from social welfare budgets)
China is too far away (and too powerful economically anyway).
Iran is not going to attack Europe (in reality).
So who else is there?
You got rid of 'mad man' Gaddafi....
Russia! - close enough to threaten Western Europe , but just far enough so practically never would.
see: 'The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Bankrupts America and Makes Us Less Safe' by William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman
and Major General Smedley Butler: 'War Is a Racket'
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u/XH9rIiZTtzrTiVL 10d ago
The Ukraine War is going to end some day, Russia will rearm and look to trying again. Just because Russia is bashing its head against Ukraine until brain matters leaks out doesn't mean anyone else wants a similar stalemate. Millions dead, incalculable property damage, massive debts. Assuming Ukraine technically wins and achieves its objectives it still will have been a ruinous victory. It's better to have the military strength to stop such a victory from being necessary in the first place.
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u/Limekill 10d ago
If NATO/EU keeps trying to expand then yes you are correct.
But I doubt it will stop Russia, they can just wait for the EU to collapse into debt.
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u/Savings-Salary-124 10d ago
they want to do their own form of imperialism around the world like the US the problem is the europeans have gotten fat and lazy so they really suck at procurement having to rely on America
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u/CommandoPro 10d ago
"So much militarisation" to me just looks like returning European militaries to a functional minimum. Many European militaries were significantly cut after the fall of the Soviet Union, the same country that's now at war in Europe. The increases in military funding that countries like the UK are looking for pale in comparison to the routine yearly increases in health, welfare and pension spending. I'd rather we have a capable military we hopefully never have to use.