[quote=“Israel_B, post:125, topic:101628”]
Indeededly so! But at least France does have experienced troops, gear that works and a will to use the two.[/quote]
“Experience” is not something that money can buy. You first need to use money to buy the capability to deploy far away from home, and then you can buy experience with the blood of innocent people in faraway countries.
Expressing the explicit wish to have “experienced troops” is just wishing for war. To defend a country, well-trained troops have to be enough.
It probably depends on whether the hypothetical event gets seen as “defending against an attack on Europe” or as yet another “world police” type engagement. No idea how that would turn out, but if I was a Russian president looking to help the Russian minority in the Baltics while expanding my own power, I wouldn’t know either.
But this is about asking for help in a very hypothetical situation. Sure, Germany will be asked last.
True. But lets take another step back and consider the purposes of military power:
- Playing the Game for the Greater Glory of The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
- Well-intended “humanitarian interventions” elsewhere
- Defending your allies or your own soil from military attack.
- Making a military attack on your allies or your own soil too costly.
All we need is #4 and some diplomacy. And sometimes, #4 is very easy and “too costly” means nothing more than “we can’t pass it off as a police action to help a country that is incapable of keeping order in its own territory”.
A lot of the pro-military-spending arguments are based around European countries’ lack of capability to perform #1 and #2.
And an alleged lack of willingness to perform #3 or even #4 cannot be fixed by increased spending, but can sometimes fix itself very quickly when the need actually arises.
