we have about 30 years of catching up to do, better defense spending:

1) Saves our lives in Europe, by having access to better training and force multipliers.

2) Seeps into the economies of every country in the union through research spending.

Defence is unambiguously a good thing, it becomes a problem if you put an expansionist cunthead at the helm of it.

We can discuss if a society should have a certain amount of GDP invested into defense and i'm not necessarily against it.

I would think educating people properly is good, I also think the swizz model is good in sense of everyone learns to handle a gun and can have it at home (as long as high security standards are set and its taken very serious).

It could be used as a tool to strengthen societies responsibility, communication and combined with what the THW is doing (technical help org).

But my statment is still true:

We do not have to catch up. We are absolutly capable of defending ourselfs against the current biggest threat which is Russia.

	▲	dijit 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think that's less true than the media would have you believe. We're undergoing a lot of propaganda about how effective Ukraine is against Russia, but that's despite most European countries practically immolating their own stockpiles of defence capability, and they're doing so somewhat unoformily (while Russia does everything they can to weaken the European homogeneity; see their funding into brexit and anti-EU seniment spreading bot farms on social media). It's definitely not a given that we can stand up to Russia with our current capability, and it's also the case that we'd be throwing human capital at the problem because we failed to adequately invest. I spoke to one person from Ukraine who was enlisted, he mentioned he was waiting for something from the UK, I asked how long does it normally take.. he told me that he doesn't measure time in weeks, but how many of his friends he he will lose. .. that hit me hard, and it made me consider who incredibly naive and coddled I was to believe that investing in military or weapons things is a "right wing" or "bad" thing.