German Chancellor Angela Merkel has thrown her weight behind the creation of a European army, telling the European Parliament on 13 November that “the times when we could rely on others are past”. Matching her rhetoric to that of French President Emmanuel Macron a week earlier, she added, “We have to take our fate fully into our own hands.”
She also implicitly raised the prospect of harmonised military requirements and a European-wide defence procurement approach in future, saying that Europe needed “a common development of armaments systems”.
“It would be a lot easier to co-operate among ourselves [but not] with 160 different weapon systems [while] the US has only 50 or 60,” she said.
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In the 2001 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress set an objective of increasing the number of remote-controlled and unmanned systems in service with the US Army. The goal was that by 2015 a third of operational ground combat vehicles would be unmanned. However, this goal was not met. Scott Alexander reports
