Innovation brought on by the fact they want to rid themselves of dependence on the USA. All around the world more and more countries and industry are looking for ways to decouple from American dependence.
> These developments follow more than £150m of investment by the Company in its UK munitions facilities since 2022
The sustained need for artillery shells since 2022 did not arise because more countries wanted to decouple from American dependence, but because a war was started that did not allow for the typical NATO doctrine of air superiority to be used. I wonder when so many artillery shells were last used as they have been in Ukraine.
I guess the last time was Vietnam or Korea? Artillery seemed a bit dated. In Ukraine is seems less important now than it was in 2022 as much of the killing is now done with drones or missiles.
>comes against the backdrop of the refusal of British and European defense companies to purchase American equipment. This is due to fears that President Donald Trump has turned the USA into an unreliable partner.
This was just one of the many articles. You can do a quick search and the theme is decouple from the USA.
As an American, this is a good thing. I don't want a world where Europe / UK are vassals to the hegemon. A European happy to live under America's boot rather than own their own destiny is a weak person indeed.
Other than the recent clown the US has elected, does the EU really feel like a "vassal"? Do people toil against their will, yield their culture to another power? In Australia we're even more so a "vassal" of England, but we're as Aussie as Aussie can be. Life wouldn't change a zack if we separated from the UK...we'd just be a Republic I suppose?
I can't imagine the EU should feel particularly different? (other than Ukraine and the recent shemozzle)
If you are invaded by China and won’t fight to the death, expecting America or someone else to save you, or would just roll over and take it, you are a vassal mentally. If some country invaded America I would fight to the death
If China invaded the vast majority of countries (eg populations <50mil) I'd expect the country to give up after a few weeks of fighting if the US or a large number of allies didn't step in. I don't see how having every man/woman (hopefully not every child!) gunned down is viable for a country.
I don't think relying on your allies makes you a vassal.
I don't think there is a country in the world that doesn't understand it will never be able to depend on the USA for security or trade. It
s not just that they elected Trump because we know that is temporary but the fact that they could elect another someone like Trump is a persistent threat.
As an American I encourage every country to decouple, and as I understand every country is working on it. Mark Carney of Canada said it best, it will never be the same, ever no matter what the future is because trust that has lasted 90 years has been broken. Canada will never have the same relationship with the USA.
For a continent with two world wars within a span of 30 years, Europe was ready for US hegemony in 1944. The Trump narrative is not really based on neither US nor European logic, but his own particular kind of gaslighting.
Empires usually operate by looting their holdings to enrich the imperial core. There is normally something that sustains their dominance.
The British Empire was the drug dealer empire, first with tobacco and later with opium. There were also some spices in there too. But the British Empire at one point covered a quarter of the globe, leading to the double-meaning of "the sun never sets on the British Empire" (also meaning it never ends).
Rome was a little diferent because of simply looting their provinces (by demanding tributes). Instead they formed alliances of mutual benefit and provinces essentially became Romanized. This sustained Rome for ~1500 years (post-Republic, ignoring the Holy Roman Empire).
Spain looted silver from South America.
The USA is an empire but it breaks the mould by generally not using direct colonization. It's probably better described as economic imperialism. Even "global" institutions largely just project US power (eg the IMF and the World Bank).
Ultimately, the US is an arms dealer empire. What backs the US dollar is the US military and, in addition to the ability to directly project global military power, the US has a ton of influence by who it chooses to sell weapons to.
Additionally, there's soft power through things like foreign aid.
Why do I mention all this? Because despite the mantra of "making America great", the current administration is doing more to destroy US direct and soft power than anyone could possibly have imagined, more than current and former adversaries (eg the USSR, China) could ever have dreamed of doing themselves.
Abandoning Ukraine, which is what the US is really doing at this point, may in fact be the catalyst to restart European weapons production. The president may complain that Europe is taking advantage of the US with NATO and we're somehow "paying for European defense" like that's a bad thing. It's not, at least from the perspective of US foreign policy and interests. NATO is what the US uses to control and influence Europe.
If Europe becomes no longer dependant on US weapons and can be responsible for European security, then NATO doesn't really need to exist, which is bad for the US and good for basically everybody else.
Now if the goal is American isolationism then all this sort of makes sense but I don't think that is the goal. Also, it's worth adding that previous periods of American isolationism happened in the lead up to both WW1 and WW2.
> Why do I mention all this? Because despite the mantra of "making America great", the current administration is doing more to destroy US direct and soft power than anyone could possibly have imagined, more than current and former adversaries (eg the USSR, China) could ever have dreamed of doing themselves.
The two aren't inconsistent; one of the major dissident observations that has propelled Trump is that the Not-An-Empire doesn't seem to be driving prosperity in the way people would expect. It is driving prosperity to the ... I dunno, call them imperial elites or upper middle class+. Obviously the empire is great for people like the Bush or Biden families. Not so obvious the 20 years of war in Afghanistan was a big win for everyone else or all the unrelated destruction. It stands out that China has built a US-sized economy in the last 50 years without really sending out any armies; military aggression obviously isn't the only factor here.
It is a complex issue but ultimately it is not easy to rule out the bureaucracy that manages the empire doing more damage to the US than the benefits empire brings. Voting by the numbers is suggesting that the damage has been significant.
Trump is an avatar to revive the imperial core, elected by a proletariat which has been looted by bourgeoisie focused on the periphery of the empire and their insular power games, eg, controlling EU via NATO. The US is not a monolith and understanding Trump requires understanding the class factions within the US.
This too has analogs in Rome.
In a present context, this is US multipolarity: focused on building the US and NA (as a modern Monroe Doctrine) while dropping foreign entanglements.
Trump’s threats against Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama are best understood within that context.
> A pilot has already demonstrated the technological breakthrough producing the explosives in small nodes. This technology would remove the need for a large-scale explosive factory. The new propellant formulation and associated manufacturing process have been demonstrated across a wide range of products from small arms to large calibre munitions.
Imagine if it could be scaled down enough so a person could carry it around, just give them feedstock and the processor creates propellant.
I know you meant that as sarcasm, but unfortunately with no shortage of narcistic lunatics in powerful positions around the world, keeping a country's ability to defend itself includes the availability of ammunition.
Europe was convinced more ammo wasn't needed anymore and the world was becoming less and less dangerous, but mainly Russia and more recently the US made it very clear that Europe was wrong in that.
So yes, more ammo obviously is needed and saying otherwise is disingenuous at best, or wilfully misleading more likely.
Don't worry about this, it is even worse. 75% of all casualties Russian military doctors see stem from drones. (In major wars before it was artillery leading this list.) So investing into artillery shells is a bit like investing in cavalry 120 years ago..
That argument does not hold. See the famous plane diagram - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald - you're talking about a highly biased sample, it isn't safe to draw that sort of conclusion.
And that is even before the observation that killing people isn't necessarily (or even usually) the goal of war.
You mean people who make it back to doctors is biased? Maybe against guns or mortars, but not so much against artillery. But this bias is also a secondary effect stemming from drones, as it increases time to evacuate or denies it totally. Which means that guns and mortars became more deadly because of drones. You can also look at the statistics of number of bullets to kill someone in major wars. Which is shockingly high. So with single digit hit percentage of drones and the numbers of drones deployed...
Supposing this is true (hard to believe anything Russian sources say), this would make sense as Ukrainians had much less 155 munitions than Russia and the Allies had a hard time helping them as everybody thought wars in Europe are a thing of the past. So this particular ratio may change in a year or two.
Cavalry was replaced by mechanised cavalry, the concept still exists with better equipment.
Drones don't replace artillery, they are a new weapon, just like air dropped bombs didn't completely replace artillery. An army with drones and artillery is more capable than an army with only drones.
The main difference is that armies learnt how to counter artillery: keep squads separated enough, assault units more dispersed, dig more foxholes, etc. They haven't learnt how to counter drones yet, the arms race for that is raging on Ukraine.
Maybe, but the existing of air burst artillery and cluster munition is not supporting this claim. Also, the digging of foxholes is done also partially to greatly decrease effectiveness of artillery fire.
Ukraine uses drones primarily because they cannot produce artillery shells and the countries supplying artillery shells all planned on not needing artillery because a B52 does the whole "remove this grid square" job quite well.
But then Trump, so....
Russia has been using plenty of artillery, like, entirely too much shitty artillery in fact. It's just as effective as it used to be.
Drones meanwhile are only effective right now because they haven't experienced a full cycle of arms race yet. Nobody has found the right "defense" for it. Automated cannons will likely nerf drone's effectiveness in a superpower conflict, and any attempt to harden a cheap drone to survive combat just drives it closer and closer in functionality and cost to an actual missile.
Basically this is like saying a navy is no longer a useful resource because of a war taking place on dry land.
do you think that the russians an ukrainians, and just about everyone else, are not not manufacturing this shit in increasing volume? do you think this is good?
What counts is if the populations are willing to engage in conflict or not; manufacturing is secondary. We have been stockpiling various weapons and decommissioning them for decades without them being used, that's a good thing. But when you convince a population that attacking another country is good, the amount of weapons is secondary as there will always be a way to get more of them.
So a lot depends on who will ascend the Russian throne once Putin dies. If he is a warmonger, he will continue feeding the public with the "we need to kill the Nazi" rhetoric and continue killing Ukrainians. The weaker Ukraine is, the more likely this scenario is to become.
