> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense

Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:

> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed

But since you wouldn't get it anyways:

The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.

EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.

They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.

Here, so you get it, as I was a bit wrong: https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/fin... - page 3.

Poland spends 4.5% and that is the highest number, the rest are spending much much less.

Tell me again how they're spending more???

The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers.

Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.

There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.