European defense manufacturers are thriving due to distrust in the US under Trump, prompting a shift towards domestic military procurement. The EU plans to invest €800 billion, enhancing economic g…
themilitaryanalyst.com
It's not all doom and gloom, in the long term Europe will be stronger and more independent as a result, but we have to stop the infighting and cooperate between countries in the EU and out of it like the UK. Ukraine and Turkey will have big roles in arming and protecting Europe.
We need to do this for more than just the military, we need full strategic autonomy. As well as the threat of having access to weapons platforms pulled from under us, there are also other dependencies we have that open us up to coercion. The key ones for me are military, energy and technology.
The military bits are pretty obvious, particularly our dependence on the US for F35, Trident and even our ability to do as we please with domestically developed capabilities like Storm Shadow. Surveillance, global positioning and AEW&C capabilities are also an issue. We need to work together with Europe to replace any capabilities that are dependent on countries that have restricted our ability to use those capabilities as we see fit or used them to coercively influence us in other ways.
We also need to develop more nuclear power facilities to reduce dependence on oil and gas as much as possible. Europe moving away from Russian gas and toward US LNG was an improvement, but still opens us up to coercive behaviour from the US.
Tech is the big one for me though. There's huge dependence on Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies, particularly for AWS, Azure and O365 product suites. They may have datacentres in the UK and Europe, but they can be switched off remotely at the drop of a hat, we have no access to audit the source code and US laws (particularly the CLOUD act) directly conflict with our own data protection laws. We need true sovereign UK & Europe cloud capabilities with full source code audits.
France have heavily invested in this direction and they are much less prone to coercion from the US goverment as a result. We need to be in a similar position. It's not zero sum either, these investments will create very highly paid jobs that stimulate the rest of the economy.
