On a good note, I saw on this mornings news that the NATO is ramping up defense funding.......
I think that's good that NATO increase their defence spending both in actual direct as well as indirect like infrastructure and cyber security. I'll just note note that heavy military vehicles, like tanks, do no need working roads and bridges to support them (the 1.5% below), as an example, that is not included in the 3.5%.
That said, the 5% of GDP is divided into 3.5% for military and 1.5% for support. For 2023 USA spent 3.7% of GDP in military. Do recall that USA, as a very big country, has to protect from the East and the West.
The first link below is a YouTube interview with deputy secretary of NATO, Radmila Shekerinska, made just before Trump landed in The Hague for the NATO summit. It's 12 minutes long but actually goes through what 5=3.5+1.5 means.
The second is interview is with former US Ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, noting that just pouring money into it at once is not the most efficient. It's an hour long interview, and this part was pretty small.
In my view, as I've posted before, Europe should invest in their own capability to make their own weapons and not just buy US weapons and munitions of various kinds. It will, of course, take quite some time to wean us of US dependency, but this is not an either/or proposition. Charles de Gaulle was right after all, it seems.
