Defense spending by EU member states is now projected to reach 381 billion euros this year, up over last year’s record of 343 billion. Despite all the money being burned at the altar of Project Ukraine, sober analysts conclude that European nations are woefully ill-equipped to successfully do much of any fighting there and no amount of money is going to change that for the foreseeable future. There are a variety of reasons for that, which we have been well covered and we won’t go into here.
But all the additional weaponry and surveillance goodies that aren’t immediately tossed into the corrupt pit of death that is Ukraine could be more likely to be used on an increasingly discontented population rather than against Russia. We’re already seeing it happen.
Militarized police are roughing up anti-genocide protestors in Berlin, in Cologne they just injured dozens participating in an anti-war march, which is now a weekly occurrence in Germany. there are draconian crackdowns on speech where the police are raiding the homes of anti-genocide and free speech protest organizers and charging them with terrorism offenses. And in most EU countries, the “war on terror” has already been used as a pretext to put soldiers on the streets and reinforce state repression as terrorists and protestors against social inequality become synonymous in the eyes of the ruling class.
In France where the economy is falling apart and workers bear the brunt of the pain, we’ve seen militarization of the police and frequent use of armored vehicles to help quell protests. And the army in the past had authorization to shoot yellow vest protestors.
Those protests might look like child’s play once the current European leadership is finished decimating national economies with endless self-destructive decisions all stemming from a ruling class dream to balkanize Russia. In the name of that goal, they have replaced cheap and affordable energy with the expensive kind, killed industry, engaged in economic warfare with much of the rest of the world in a failed bid to isolate Moscow, and become completely beholden to American vultures.
And it’s likely only to get worse.
Will Backlash Intensify as War on Workers Does?
Even the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) admits that the public is not on board with the whole ruling class militarization fever dream, and while it recommends media efforts to sway them, none have been effective enough over the past three years.
ECFR also provides some communication tips, such as promising that guns will equal butter, but we’re already seeing that those promises will not become reality. What happens when that realization sets in among the public as standards of living continue to decline?
If we take a closer look at EU elite obsession with competitiveness, much of it is simply code for a war on workers. The big prescriptions in a Mario Draghi report requested by Ursula’s European Commission last year—many of which are already being adopted incrementally by national governments—include the following:
- Less Labor Law for “Innovative” Companies
- Free Rein to AI and Tech Start Ups
- More “Disruption”
- Learn from Hyper-globalization which Decimated Labor by Embracing AI in an effort to Decimate Labor
- Overhaul Education “Skills Investment” With a Focus on Training Workers to Become Productive Tools for Capital
- And continue to slice away at the welfare state through budget cuts and privatizations that, of course, increase “competitiveness.”
Yes, the “peace dividend” is “finally over,” the vultures declare. They should know as they were the ones who ended it. Yet, oddly enough, the knockout blow to European competitiveness—severing itself from the East and deciding to become evermore reliant on the US—rarely gets a mention from the people who decided on such a course of action. And now European and transnational capital say workers must sacrifice more and social systems be destroyed in the name of “competitiveness.”
One wonders whether the welfare states are the cost of the failed Project Ukraine wager or they were part of the target all along. Either way the panic over the bill is being used to pursue privatizations, benefits cuts, public money transfers to defense industries, and a more exploitable workforce.
We should be moving to a four day work week, not a six day one. Forty percent or more of of jobs are either pointless or actively harmless. Get rid of them to start. https://t.co/Ubdr4Q5VCi
— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) July 2, 2024
Outfits like the ECFR can provide an uplifting guns vs. butter communication strategy, but the real deal EU rulers are imposing is clear: More work for less butter to compensate for our mistakes and so we can buy more guns that might eventually be used against you to force you to do what we say.
The War at Home Is Here
A dimwit elite obsessed with military toys that will be useless on the Eurasian Steppe. Economies that no longer function for the working class. A ramp up of the welfare state bust out. Meanwhile, business is good for some.
Profit margins for Weapon and Ammunition at Rheinmetall went up from 23% to 28.5% from 2023 to 2024. Of every Euro in public money spent on weapons from Rheinmetall, the company makes 28.5% return on sales, quite spectacular even compared to other Rheinmetall business. pic.twitter.com/SvKmjNcB30
— Isabella M Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) April 28, 2025
How long until this sight is more common?
Tanks rolling into Brussels’ downtown park on a sunny Sunday, right by the European Commission. What’s this military exhibition really about? Are we prepping for war or just showing off? Who’s the enemy—Russia, China, or some vague “threat”? pic.twitter.com/cwya2JD7M6
— Eldar Mamedov (@EldarMamedov4) April 27, 2025
As NC reader Munchausen notes about the above “tanks”:
Those are not tanks, but lightly armored wheeled vehicles. Useful against insurgents and civilians, not so much in case Russia/China visits with real tanks. That should answer the “Who’s the enemy?” question.
And many of the preparations being made ostensibly for war with Russia could also apply to war with their own citizenry. For example, in Germany the Bundeswehr are paying visits to districts to help prepare them for what’s described as the growing possibility of war on German soil. According to CORRECTIV, these planning sessions are focused on identifying critical infrastructure to be guarded and ways to “intercept saboteurs.”
All the planning is ostensibly about transforming the country into a logistical hub supplying the Eastern front, but this Operation Plan Deutschland also notes how the “mindset of the population” is one of the greatest challenges.
Much less visible and perhaps more worrisome, however, is the proliferation of secret state surveillance. These dystopian tools are increasingly being used against European journalists, politicians, organizers, immigrants, and protestors as the EU draws inspiration and expertise from their favorite genocidaires in Israel.
Those committing genocide are also beneficiaries of all the increased EU spending on defense. As Nate Bear recently pointed out, the EU has given Israeli technology start-ups run by ex-IDF soldiers nearly half a billion euros in research grants since the start of the Gaza genocide.
And the same surveillance and population control tech used by Israel on Palestinians is being adopted by European governments. Who are they going to use it against?
Let’s take a look.
Rome-based RCS, considered a competitor of Israeli NSO’s Pegasus, has its Hermit spyware, which can be used to remotely activate a phone’s microphone, as well as record calls, access messages, call logs, contacts, photos and other sensitive data. And it’s already widely in use in the EU.
Italy, which is a spyware hub of Europe, has other companies like Memento Labs, formerly known as Hacking Team; and IPS-Intelligence, which are used by European governments.
And there are others popping up, such as Invasys, a Czech firm offering its “offensive cyber” program Kelpie with the ability to access fully encrypted communications apps after hacking into iPhones and Android. No doubt there will be more with the ramp up of defense spending. So we can look forward to more of what’s been going on in Greece. It was there that journalists and a member of the European Parliament—and at the time, the leading candidate to take over Greece’s center-left party—were targeted by Predator spyware, a product of the companies Intellexa, based in Greece, and North Macedonia-based Cytrox—both with ties to Israel Defense Force intelligence.
A European Parliament report from last year shows the bloc’s secret state surveillance problem goes far beyond Pegasus and Predator. A few takeaways:
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“Member States are not just customers of commercial spyware vendors, they also have other, different roles in the spyware trade. Some host spyware vendors, some are the preferred destination for finance and banking services, and yet others offer citizenship and residency to protagonists of the industry.”
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“… concerns have been raised about certain countries’ permissive intelligence frameworks, ineffective checks, lax oversight practices and political interference.”
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“Spyware is clearly also used by law enforcement, not just by intelligence agencies. There are serious concerns about the admissibility in court of such material as evidence in the context of EU police and justice cooperation, including within Europol and Eurojust, if such information were to originate from investigation methods applied without proper judicial oversight. Depending on the national legislation, the use of spyware is legitimate in investigations under judicial oversight.”
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“It can be safely assumed that authorities in all Member States use spyware in one way or another, some legitimate, some illegitimate. Spyware may be acquired directly, or through a proxy, broker company or middleman. There may also be arrangements for specific services, instead of actually purchasing the software. Additional services may be offered, such as training of staff or the provision of servers. Spyware is not to be seen in isolation, but as part of a wide range of products and services offered in an expanding and lucrative global market. It is important to realise that the purchase and use of spyware is very costly, running into millions of euros. But in many Member States this expenditure is not included in the regular budget, and it may thus escape scrutiny.”
The EU is ramping up AI-driven population control intelligence, which has become notorious in Israel-Palestine. A host of companies claim they can detect suspicious behavior or other “anomalies” in all the data being vacuumed up.
For example, Israeli firm Toka Cyber has started to land contracts with European governments. According to Haaretz, it “straddles the world of active cyber and so-called passive intelligence: The company is secretive about its tech and when approached they refused to provide any details of their activities. When reminded that Haaretz revealed last year that the firm sells tech that hacks into security cameras and even alters their video feeds for intelligence and operational needs, Toka’s representatives responded: “allegedly.”
Cobwebs, an Israeli firm which specializes in collecting data from across all social media, even scraping content from those that self-delete after a set period of time, was used by Israel as part of its attempt to “identify” and subsequently kill Palestinians.
It was acquired by American private equity firm Spire Capital in 2023 and develops cyber intelligence solutions for enforcement bodies, national security agencies, and financial services across the world, but with a particular focus on the U.S. and Western Europe.
It’s easy to see why Spire was attracted to that cash cow. Investors are licking their chops at all the opportunities as governments shovel public money into into the military-industrial-tech complex. There are a whole slate of “attractive” investment opportunities, according to Taylor Wessing, a “global law firm that serves the world’s most innovative people and businesses” (and notice how all of these technologies could be used for those “innovative” people against the lowly, non-innovative workers):
- Unmanned systems.
- Automated reconnaissance and surveillance.
- Predictive maintenance.
- Advanced data analytics and fusion.
- Predictive decision-making.
- Deception and counter-deception.
As Taylor Wessing notes, the shift from hardware-centric to software-driven defence systems like AI-powered solutions for command and control, data analytics, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and autonomous decision-making is a major trend. And European “defense champions” like Thales, Leonardo, Saab and Hensoldt—as well as smaller, new entrants—are rushing to meet the demand created by a European ruling class gone mad.
While Israel has its Palestine Laboratory, EU countries have mostly fine tuned their surveillance, imprisonment tech, and AI predictive systems on migrants and refugees. As Patrick Breyer, a European lawmaker with the German Pirate Party who took the EU to court to uncover the secrets of its AI-powered lie detection systems, argued:
“What we are seeing at the borders, and in treating foreign nationals generally, is that it’s often a testing field for technologies that are later used on Europeans as well,” he told the Associated Press. “And that’s why everyone should care, in their own self-interest.”
Breyer’s argument has proven correct as European governments are now using facial recognition, IMSI catchers, drones, and AI predictive policing against protestors, which means these governments are largely indistinguishable from so many of those “authoritarian regimes” they wax on about. How much more will they begin to resemble their favorite “democracy” in Israel? There we get to see livestreamed the reliance on more brutal forms of control and extermination necessitated by a ruling class’ unquenchable thirst for plunder of assets and people.
One can see similarities too in the mix of panic and paranoia with bloodlust and a sense of infallibility between the Zionist elite and the mania gripping the European ruling class.
This warning from few years ago looks increasingly accurate:
As protests pick up and we see the UK and other countries across Europe invest heavily in population control surveillance and go after anti-genocide, anti-war and labor organizers, it brings back memories of one of the most chilling quotes from an Israeli human rights lawyer in Antony Loewenstein’s book The Palestine Laboratory:
“Because of surveillance tech, a country can avoid massacring protestors now. Today, we’re able to identify and stop surveillance of the next Nelson Mandela before he even knows he’s Nelson Mandela.”
We’ll see. The tech tyrants always overestimate the capabilities of their products. Do you surveil and stop hundreds? Thousands? More? Let’s end on an optimistic take:
857 arrests in one day. Think about the amount of bureaucracy this requires, and the huge investment in manpower and work hours. The mental strain.
The absurdity of aiding and abetting a holocaust while trying to censor the opposition and resistance to it sheds a giant light on… https://t.co/HOuekyWnpL
— Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) September 7, 2025
Just a pedantic nitpick: multi-wheeled APCs have been in use since The Second World War, they are plenty useful in warfare as they protect primarily from artillery fragments which are the real killer in warfare. They are not supposed to be shot at by tanks, they stop well short of where a tank should be.
Their role in the new drone-centric warfare is in flux, they might have to stay even further back or there may be ways to mitigate drone attacks. It’s far too early to tell.
They say that Stryker is an excelent vehicle, as long as you are on the road, and it is not raining, and you are not engaged in combat. Jokes aside, of course they are useful, but there are nuances (as Russians would say).
Wheeled APCs are intended for more-or-less road based purposes. For example, Russians have been using their BTRs to patrol Syria. Also, French are known for using wheeled armored vehicles in their colonies. But, for a proper war in the muddy steppes, you need tracked vehicles and tanks leading the column (and taking hits). Drone influence comes after that, and they don’t care much about the type of the vehicle (unless it’s a barn tank).
The MRAP vehicle class (on the second image to the right, in sand camo) was designed for policing hostile population (in the Sandbox). The West is sending those to the Ukraine only because that’s all they got on stock in large numbers. You don’t prepare for a large scale war in Eurasia by producing MRAPs.
I can’t disagree with you there.
However for range and speed on good ground wheeled APCs are still a good choice, even the old BTR-60PU is still soldiering on.
I think the vehicle that will disappear in peer-to-peer conflict is the Infantry Fighting Vehicle – after only fifty years it seems to have hit an evolutionary dead end. Currently they’re into the forty tonne range, the weight of a medium tank in The Second World War, and carrying less and less troops. Not even main battle tanks have a worthwhile survival rate in the front line at the moment and they tend to have five times the protection. IFVs as seen in the sad ‘Bradley Square’ don’t survive contact. IFVs are no longer fit for purpose, they’d be better fitting MBTs with close support weapons.
I do frequently wonder exactly what Europe is arming against, now is absolutely not the time to tool up for last generation weapons and they must be aware of it. France and Italy suffered terribly in The Second World War because they had to rearm at the wrong time and their systems fared badly against systems half a decade older. Western Europe knows that the military paradigm is rapidly shifting but is about to buy and build big on systems that are showing to be not performing and not performing drastically at that.
Personally I suspect graft.
Top down attack munition, ai drone swarm and wire guided drones that can target the most vulnerable areas of any vehicle, are the conditions of the battlefield that all frontline vehicles must face. The tank and IFV will only serve in the role of front line combat vehicle if some new types of protection can be deployed, either for the vehicle or the group of vehicles. If not, both will be relegated to only a fire support role, or become obsolete.
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1962805580944355579
🇺🇦🇷🇺 Tank Monster
A couple of months ago, Ukraine published footage of a tank with a “tsar-grill” from the 4th brigade of the Russian Armed Forces, which, as reported, the Ukrainian forces managed to stop only after using 60 FPV drones.
Kolyan, the commander of the tank battalion of the 4th brigade, said on stream that his tank actually withstood a swarm of Ukranian drones, and stopped on the battlefield due to an unfortunate technical failure – the gearbox broke down. The vehicle was already battle-worn – a captured T-72.
The crew, by the way, managed to complete the mission – they delivered the infantry intact. The tankers were also unharmed.
…
In urban war tracked vehicles make a lot of noise, particularly moving at speed. The wheel vehicles put a squad silently in place, why Stryker in U.S. Army, Bradley not for urban war.
Wheels do give up mobility in rough terrain and generally have less armor.
South Africa used wheeled suggesting to US Stryker.
Good article.
TPTB will fail in this endeavour.
But the lost opportunities will bring much tragedy.
GAZA tactics …
May I write the summary I made for myself?
–Narrative control in the media and developing tools to increase it in the web (hat tip Nick Corbishley). For instance, recently “showing” the Russians jamming vdL flights with a concerted effort by the MSM —> Rusians = predators. A contrarian example would be how Israel/Gaza narrative is “failing” and even changing to opposite narratives.
-When narrative control does not suffice we need repression in the streets. So far i think this is is being applied the hardest in the UK and Germany, not in all of Europe, or at least not equally, because the failure mentioned in the first point.
-Full control might be obtained by comprehensive surveillance. Here both Conor and Corbishley have contributed and it looks the “Europeans” want to follow the steps of uncle US though, here in Europe, the political and administrative landscape (Except may be the UK?) makes the effort somehow more difficult. How do you call someone obsessed with surveillance and control… paranoid? unsecure?
Hypothesis of this article: military spending might be, at least in part, a disguise for investment in repression and surveillance tools (here again Germany looks leading). So far I buy it.
“War against their own populations” is in my opinion somehow excessive wording, specially for a headline. It wouldn’t be that noisy in the content of the article. This reflects how all of us become contaminated, unwillingly but relentlessly, by the narrative. The Department of War. It does not help. In any case, I liked the article.
Let’s say: Europe increasing military spending: Is it for defence as stated or for surveillance & repression of the populaces?
I know this is not better headline but we avoid two wars in the headline.
Ignacio
Let’s see if the site allows me to comment. This morning, my comment went into the ionosphere, never to return.
War Is the Health of the State. Randolph Bourne. In current neoliberal thought, the purpose of the state is to subjugate the citizens to markets. It is a class war — privatized health care, degraded calvinist moralizing, non-enforcement of the law. An economy based on colonialism and war profiteering.
Will things get physical? The elites do not want a change in hegemony. If necessary, the elites will slaughter the peasants. A peculiarity of the U S of A is that the peasants believe they deserve to be slaughtered.
I too was thinking about the differences across Europe. The framing of the article presupposes “the current European leadership” having some homogeneity and a coherent plan. I think NC readers can understand what that’s referring to. But the illegitimacy that’s driving the ruling class to war and authoritarian rule is also centrifugal: the more the centrist cartels get authoritarian in defense of the old Atlantist order, the more the nationalist parties gain. Every time leaders of the Coalition of the Willing jet off to a war summit I imagine the nationalists gaining some votes. So I’m not sure the dynamic Conor describes is ultimately only centripital.
I’m very interested in commenters’ views of what’s happening in different parts of Europe.
The silencing of a humane instinct shown in the BBC-commissioned documentary on children surviving in a genocide is an important illustration of data swept up en masse. My family called on the agricultural extension service for help when our tomatoes were shriveling. I remembered that “incriminating” detail when I learned the zionist attackers blocking the airing of the documentary had learned that one of the children had a family member who was a petty official in Gaza agriculture. That was enough to cover our eyes across the world, and in Gaza it would target the entire family for murder in a drone strike against “Hamas.” These data sweeps place any of us in the crosshairs for elimination.
I heard that the Coalition of the Willing thinks that they can assemble about 20,000 troops to go into the Ukraine. I most emphatically call bs on this claim as I reckon that the numbers will be much lower. But supposing that a 20,000 man NATO formation went into the Ukraine, that it would take the Russians about a week to annihilate it with the remnants fleeing to the Polish or Romanian border. This being the case, then those troops can be only for suppressing dissent in the EU. Consider. Since Maastrict, the elites have set fire to Europe and it is now a train wreck. The reliable, cheap Russian energy is now heading to China and it will never come back. Country after country is being deindustrialized and the elites are demanding that the people give up holidays, work an extra day, have their pensions, infrastructure, healthcare and education and all at the same time they plunge the EU into debt so that a non-EU country can be supported, even if it destroys their economies. Of course people will be rebelling at this and that is the real reason why the military is being boosted and conscription being brought back.
The spirit is willing. but the flesh is weak.
The Coalition is willing, but they have flesh for about a week.
Two points — not rebuttals, just some added nuance.
1) The article is a good description of the strong interest from EU governments in relying upon AI tools to automate large-scale surveillance, and of their eager adoption of spyware to target selected persons of interest.
These moves have a good underlying reason: just like armed forces, police forces lack sufficient personnel to perform all the surveillance and security tasks entrusted to them by governments.
Let us take France as an example: during the “gilets jaunes” movement, the government had to mobilise the police and the gendarmerie (then formally a branch of the military, with the same duties and powers as the police but outside urban areas), and within those two corps, drawing on absolutely every department — even those that had nothing to do with crowd control and were not even trained for it.
2) When it comes to the assertion that “of course people will be rebelling at this”, I have the uneasy feeling that this will become increasingly more arduous and ineffective as time passes. Not necessarily because that sypware and newfangled AI software will prove particularly effective, but rather because European societies are aging fast, and are factually already quite old (see Germany or Italy). How can a rebellion achieve the critical mass of outraged, active participants in a sustained campaign if the cohorts of young, dynamic protesters are small, possibly further depleted by emigration?
AI in USA!
AI in commerce/workflows is sort of like a management fad, implemented slowly and with lesser project success rate that other SW implementation.
However, US DHS has a huge interest in national facial and object recognition. There are cameras everywhere, all tied to the cloud.
Huge data centers are needed for population surveillance, AI facial recognition is 99%.
AI is more likely to take your liberty than your job.
While in the larger DC metro, the electric rates will explode to power DHS data plans.
Has Russia actually said anything of the sort?
I suggest you bone up on the time and cost of constructing pipelines.
And didn’t they just make it illegal to repair/use the Nordstream pipeline? So any Russian energy is going to be, at best, the couple of small transits they have now.
Zelensky & co. made it illegal to negotiate with Russians, but they still did it. Change of heart about Nordstream would not be so easy to implement because the Boss blew it up (expecting that the vassal might be tempted to go back into the Russian gas-heated warm embrace once the things get tough). Zelensky & co. have been targeting the remaining pipeline infrastructure for same reasons.
The UK tested its National Emergency alert system on 4g and 5g mobiles yesterday and from the moment I got a government message announcing it a week or two ago and, given recent events, I automatically assumed that HMG was preparing for war and/or a false flag leading to rounding up and disappearing leading figures opposing the government in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK. Interestingly, my ancient 2g mobile which I still have occasion to use to verify my identity also received to alert. I am informed that such alerts can inform the authorities of the location of any mobile owned or used by any person of interest.
LOL. As I got to the “Tanks rolling into Brussels’ …” part, I thought to myself “those are not tanks” (a Pavlovian reflex of a military technology enthusiast I guess), and got the déjà vu feeling.
To me the EU seems like the USSR would’ve been if they came upon the technology for algorithmic governance decades ago. They’re undergoing some weird process of Sovietization, not only in terms of surveillance and authoritarianism but also incompetent leadership and consistently poor economic policy.
I saw a clip from the British ministry of war allegedly showing a training exercise in preparation for posting to Ukraine. It consisted of a tank ploughing through rubble in a deserted town with a number of soldiers close behind it.
Even a military bear with the tiniest of brains should know by now that both tank and soldiers would be immediate targets of Russian drones and pretty much all wiped out within minutes.
However, tanks followed by soldiers would not face military drones in their own country so yes, the PTB are training to put down any protests or worse from their own population.
Saw the same clip and it was an ad for the Royal Armoured Corps and I thought are they serious? It may have worked several years ago but try that in the Ukraine and you will have no survivors-
https://www.bitchute.com/video/1BAnmx3QxW6d
Short answer, no.
Military forces and military equipment are not suited to crime-fighting, and would be hopeless at it. They are not much good for public order duties either, and require special training and equipment. Even then, things easily go wrong.
The hysteria about defence and budgets is to do with the war psychosis that I discussed in my essay last week, and will abate with time because these things do. No country will spend 5% of its GDP on defence, and if such sums were ever theoretically voted by parliament, they could never be spent because the resources to buy (notably human) just don’t exist. There is no chance of a return to conscription.
Government panics over social unrest and political protests are quite a different thing, and derive essentially from fear at the heart of the PMC. But one thing they do know is that if they try to “declare war” on the people, they will lose. Badly.
The French police are not being “militarised.” There are two national police forces, the Police Nationale which is mainly responsible for the cities, and the Gendarmerie, which is part of the military (and serves the function of military police) but for historical reasons also looks after police duties in smaller communities. On the whole it has a better public image. Both organisations have specially trained crowd control and public order units with vehicles. There are no plans to change this.
I think you have the right viewpoint. However, all movements need leaders.
I saw recently that a Federal judge was ‘SWAT-ed’ here in the US by someone claiming that the judge had murdered his wife (he didn’t). So these kinds of terror-esque tactics are bound to be effective in controlling the formation of mass resistance
groups. AI can be used to potentially defund nascent resistance finances.
Here in the US, ICE is offering small-town police 100K$ to join ICE, making rural
areas far less safe for residents. Well done, Siliconistas!
Spain promised in the NATO Summit in Madrid that it would increase the defence budget to 2% and so has done by this year but i doubt it will go much higher even if the conservatives win next elections. If “far right” parties win any government the picture can change. Where this new spending is going i don’t know exactly though most of it will go to expenditures other than extremely expensive military hardware. Investments in ISR are part of it. Military surveillance is a different thing compared to social mass surveillance though some “smart” guys might find it useful to direct surveillance to a few socio-political targets that can be classified as “dangerous for the country” and a matter of “defence”. Another way of going, which i would consider more likely if and when nationalist parties the kind of Afd, RN, VOX, get to lead any country, is by inserting more and more military commanders in positions of internal security. This has been the way in South American countries and the excuse is always the same: increase of violence and criminality rather than social protests. I see for instance potential for this development in several European cities which have turned large neighbourhoods into out of law quarters.
scary. Especially if one considers the level of violence of government demonstrated against the yellow vests (the numbers killed and maimed is staggering and if done by “authoritarian” China, would be front page everywhere (which is how we know its not happening in China). I also recall the spanish government – socialist I think – smashing the faces of grandmas who wanted to vote in a non-binding referenda for Catalonia. Non-Binding! And the EU responded with silence (or silent applause). Scary times ahead.
During the Gilets jaunes protests about a million people in total demonstrated in the streets. There was little control, and some of them, and especially other groups and criminal gangs that joined in, smashed up shopping centre and public buildings and, on one occasion a children’s hospital. (I saw the results.) The Police essentially stood by because they were ordered to, which infuriated much of the population who saw businesses and shopping centres smashed up and shut down.
About a hundred people were injured enough to need hospital treatment (and about the same number of Police.) Several deaths were associated with the violence, but it’s not clear how and why. This is a lower level of violence than you expect from the average football season: two people died after a football match at St Denis outside Paris earlier this year but that didn’t even make the front page, so routine is that level of violence.
I once sold my car to a mid-ranking gendarme, and drove with him to his apartment on base near Paris to get the check (gendarmes live on base). We drove by the training areas (the famous “parcours du combattant”) and mock hostage and terrorist attack setups. Edifying.
Then we came upon a big building with a fleet of armored vehicles outside, and smaller gun mounted military Renault trucks and some weird things that I couldn’t make out, because I’m not really a guy who knows what these things are, in garages being serviced. I said, hey this looks like pretty heavy metal for the Gendarmes. He replied to the effect – it’s not talked about much but we train to use these in case we need to against our own people. It bothers most of us and nobody talks about it. These weren’t tanks or big howitzers, but it sure looked like you could easily take control over a significant part of a first tier city with that stuff.
If you look at the area on Google maps, it’s all blurred out.
Don’t forget that the gendarmerie are trained as light infantry and can deploy as such up to company strength. One of their traditional roles in war was traffic control and keeping the motorways open, and sealing off and securing sensitive areas. I suspect they still do that and that’s what the vehicles are for. It’s true, of course, that every government in the world has to have plans for what to do in the case of a really serious attempt to overthrow it, and French history, as you well know, isn’t exactly short of such examples. But the Gendarmes are always going to be the preferred weapon of last resort, because they are trained for things the regular Army isn’t.
What those vehicles are for is not anodyne, and though I’m sure that our demographic is not going to be particularly threatened by them unless you join me in the street at the point where it seems necessary to get out there.
I’m repeating exactly what the gendarme told me. And you’re right when you say above that they are much more respected than the Police Nationale, who see citizens as adversaries to be corralled at best. At least the Gendarmes are literate and educated in Republican Values. Hopefully they remember them and take the side of the Republic. A Rallye Nationale (or worse right wing) government will not hesitate to use all of the means of violence of the state to exert control over the putative Left and any undesirable people they want out.
Surplus U.S. Army MRAPs have been issued to urban police forces. The vehicle was rapidly designed and bought to respond to IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For several reasons they were less than suitable. They are wheeled and quiet, non destructive to urban streets could be useful in controlling urban riots.
Great article.
I agree with comments that it’s pretty clear the same thing is happening in the usa. Witnessing yesterday news from the Pentagon (posted on NC yesterday Re: Hegseth)
This is not just a European problem. Sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Tibktock all have frequent pro war posts, remembering the ‘heroes’ of wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq – all wars that killed more civilians that ‘military’ by any count.
Criticizing these war posts – particularly on the ‘business’ site Linkedin, results in accounts being suspended or blocked completely. The profit boasts of the war industries therefore go without analysis.
All of this is building towards a war by feeding the population information of how good wars are, how those involved are on the side of the right and good and – as every internet user wants – fame even after death.
> Is Europe Preparing for War Against Russia or Against Own Populations?
#WhyNotBothMeme (via dailydot.com)
I’m not sure most Europeans will want to mess with Russia anymore once the full cost becomes apparent … and therefore I give more credence to the latter.
The most chilling distillation of the consequences of warmongering against Russia by Europe came from that Russian evening news show, where one of the animated talking heads bluntly stated how long it would take a hypersonic missile to get from Russia to western Europe – just over 100 seconds (IIRC).
As the last elections in Romania showed, there is no room in Western European “democracy” for peace with Russia, and the warmongering that increasingly has no outlet eastward with most definitely turn inward.
No western population under the emerging fascist faux-democracies enabled by billionaire neoliberalism is going to be able to solely “vote” their way out of the morass.
Bastilles and Mangiones it will have to be …
Sound travels about one third of a kilometer per second. 10 Mach in 100 seconds is about one third of a 1000 kilometers, assuming that the flight is in a straight line at constant speed (which it is not).
Ah, my math isn’t mathing … :)
I’ll try to find the clip … it may have been double what I suggested.
It doesn’t matter. All those numbers are thrown out for shock value only, and are often taken out of someone’s rear end. Medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles have always been fast, because they go in outer space where no air resistance is present. The hypersonic hype is actually only about the terminal part of their trajectory.
How did Israel use this against its own people?
A false flag psy-op luring lefty hippies with the desert music fest, followed by wholesale slaughter by helicopter and tank fires. The evidence of cars, bodies mass buried. Then using social media and media to “cleanse” Gaza by blaming “Hamas” which was yet another foreign funded long term psy-op against Palistinians to break Gaza away from the PLA.
from German NACHDENKSEITEN
use google to translate
The fatal triumph of the US lobbies: The EU should ban Russian gas “forever”
https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=138695
Forgive me for maybe relying too much solely on Andrei Martyanov but I am convinced that in the background of all this, the principles and the data by which normative military decisions are made in the US at the moment – and those will eventually be formative for EU too – the undeniable fact that military supremacy has shifted to Russia is limiting and determining paths taken – and those not.
The features and capabilities of the various Russian missile systems (range, speed, impact), AD, or AA missiles, among other things, which have proven either battlefield reliability or at least genuine operationabilty (unlike the various Dark Eagle interpretations) are facts of the material world now which cannot be neglected nor reversed and now seriously limit e.g. the once enjoyed limitless might of the US Navy.
Policies over war and peace follow from those constraints. Not the other way around. (Which is why Martyanov so passionately quotes DUNE…)
And as one can observe from German outlets such as TELEPOLIS these facts are being acknowledged on a certain level by the military community with a 1- 3 year delay.
So from starting there more likely potential future scenarios might be more predictable.
Which makes turning on the own population more likely.
But there are limits to that too.
What does the ruling class desire? Get itself killed, trigger a WWIII, or rather enrich itself?
If we look at the failed Democrats and Greens now, 4 years after they kicked off this war for real, what do we see?
The public actors are fading away, Blinken, Sullivan, Kagans, Baerbock, Habeck etc. are toying around in academia or representative garbage canst like the UN. Sanna Marin of Finland was the first to jump ship onto a sunny coconut island and a 5-star hotel plus pool.
Of course the background structures of the MIC are still there and here one should seriously distinguish between EU and the US in their longterm and depth of influence – but even their reach will carry them only so far, if they do not plan to end up in Armageddon. There is more to gain from turning onto the domestic front and smaller enemies than facing Russia.
That said I doubt that in Germany we will have a more militarized version of the Army than we already had during the Cold War. And I dare say the culture of woke might turn out to be an ally in this.
You have to consider what kind of generation it was that had made up the body of Bundswehr. Of course I can be proven wrong but the change of the cultural paradigm cannot be just altered by putting out videos on children TV channels about Mr. Scalp and Mr. Storm Shadow, or sending a few Bundeswehr reps to schools and higher education.
Letting Ukrainians get killed (keep in mind 90% of Germans do not know the true casualty numbers of this war) in a still distant war is one thing (how many Germany have ever been to Donbas or even Kiev?).
Getting yourself killed or your kid a completely different one.
People might be greedy. They are not stupid.