EU has more people than the US and similar levels of wealth. They could choose to spend as much as the US on winning war if they wanted to. They don’t because you can’t just spend on everything you want, there are always trade offs and compromises (inflation and standard of living are the most likely to be compromised if you don’t think about them). The EU is now faced with the likelihood that they must spend more on defense and in turn compromise something else - this is a hard problem.
The EU has more ppl, but more importantly, they have spare industrial capacity - DE in particular has Ulverston high quality industrial capacity to spare.
You can’t really talk about wealth on this topic, and have to instead talk about economy - and of course the US has a monster economy.
What the EU lacks is political cohesion around support for Ulraine.
We are not talking about what EU can spend on Ukraine, we have to talk about what they will spend. Does buying tomahawks make more sense than investing in the domestic Ukr military industrial capacity? The value of the spend on US weapons lower than the value of the development of domestic capacity (EU and/or Ukr); not considering any political capital gained with the Americans.
The thing you have to understand is cruise missiles are the most expensive tool of military strike/state violence, each target gets its own mini-jet aircraft devoted to its destruction, capability is one thing, reserves and volume are another. That is what makes this decisive.
Tomahawks aren’t that much of an upgrade for the Ukrainians, but the volume could help.
Aren’t they also a lot stealthier and harder to shoot down than anything Ukraine currently has?
That could be true. I understand that Ukrainians have been taking advantage of RU being spread too thin in AA, but stealth would be better.
Not sure if it worth the cost though. US spends money to win wars; UKR & EU don’t have the same luxury.
EU has more people than the US and similar levels of wealth. They could choose to spend as much as the US on winning war if they wanted to. They don’t because you can’t just spend on everything you want, there are always trade offs and compromises (inflation and standard of living are the most likely to be compromised if you don’t think about them). The EU is now faced with the likelihood that they must spend more on defense and in turn compromise something else - this is a hard problem.
The EU has more ppl, but more importantly, they have spare industrial capacity - DE in particular has Ulverston high quality industrial capacity to spare.
You can’t really talk about wealth on this topic, and have to instead talk about economy - and of course the US has a monster economy. What the EU lacks is political cohesion around support for Ulraine.
We are not talking about what EU can spend on Ukraine, we have to talk about what they will spend. Does buying tomahawks make more sense than investing in the domestic Ukr military industrial capacity? The value of the spend on US weapons lower than the value of the development of domestic capacity (EU and/or Ukr); not considering any political capital gained with the Americans.
Yep, they can fly very low, making them hard to see on the radar
The thing you have to understand is cruise missiles are the most expensive tool of military strike/state violence, each target gets its own mini-jet aircraft devoted to its destruction, capability is one thing, reserves and volume are another. That is what makes this decisive.