Fuck yea, Straya! Nice one.
...
So, now that the EU has started the long and arduous task of standardising army procurement, R&D and training of specialists, it's time for a certain part of our populace to freak the flip out because it's clear that we will have an EU army under Brussels control within the next year, a major war against insurgents in Great Britain under the guise of peacekeeping, and general tyrannical rule of EU under direct control of Germany, with the aid of France.
Yikes. We Krauts better get around to cloning Hitler and giving him some body armour, otherwise allied forces won't have anything to shoot at when they come back for another world liberation tour. Seems like we've fallen behind schedule.
As much as I'm going blind from excessive eye rolling, can someone hook me up with a reasoned and plausible argument why this recent cooperation is a bad thing? I'm always up for broadening my horizons. So far I've only come across nebulous "bureaucracy" horror scenarios and such that only work because their proponent firmly believes that everything that can go wrong will go wrong as long as it is even vaguely connected to EU.
I'm a bit late but the net swallowed an earlier answer :
- Firstly any effort directed to "European defence" is less done on national security. It's not just investments, since there's talks of trying to set up an early integrated command. The end goal is clearly to create the backbone of an European army. It's of course a deep no-no for any nationalist or anyone concerned with sovereignty, a rather large demographic.
- Even without the ideological argument, one can be doubtful that transferring even parts of such a sensitive subject from clear, defined polities to a group of 23 (IIRC) countries is really conductive of any efficiency. It's unworkable to decide any real military action (a war can only be prosecuted with strong political resolve and direction) -though we're still not there- and may cause issues in deciding allocation and procurement. Past European efforts in the matter (including some industrial collaborations, look at some of the Franco-British warplane failures) were not all a success.
- There will be friction with regard to the US defence contractors, who supply quite a few European countries and in some case are embedded (in Great Britain, notably).
There's also other considerations (the rift of views of the use of projecting power between France and Germany, Brexit which is both a blessing and a curse...) at play.
It's probably needed to step up European defence funding to the continental level if only for economies of scale, but those need a very firm hand. Ideally we want a new AMCT, not a repeat of the ECD. But the former was only achieved in the most gruesome of wartime and height of necessity.
