I’m Gonna Harp on European Defense Posturing a Little More

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In yesterday’s post about the collective – and expensive – efforts the Europeans and Britain have suddenly found themselves thrust into with Trump’s election and their years of neglect as far as their own defense budgets went, I basically hit two points – predominantly money (of which they need a buttload and don’t have)… 

…After the Oval Office implosion of Volodymyr Zelensky’s continued shakedown hopes and dreams, the Ukrainian president scuttled off to Europe, seeking succor and sustenance from his European friends. The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, immediately rushed into the breach. offering billions in aid for the Ukrainian effort, including an offer of British troops on the ground in peace-keeping roles.

The European Union, galvanized into travel by Trump’s booting the besweatered Ukrainian president from the White House without his lunch, called an emergency meeting of their members to discuss now urgent defense-related matters, like…deciding where they would acquire some sort of European defense capabilities.

In world record time (for them) of forty-eight hours, the EU member states banged heads, talked bad about Trump, and agreed to poop €800 billion between the lot of them for something called the ReArm Europe Program and prove they didn’t need the United States, no, siree, Bob, they don’t.

…and lightly touched on manpower issues with a ghastly anecdote from the situation the UK Royal Air Force currently finds themselves in.

…The shortage comes after the RAF’s diversity drive was found to be unlawful to white male would-be recruits.

Under Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston’s stewardship, the air force committed to having 40 per cent women and 20 per cent of personnel from ethnic minorities by 2030.

During the drive, leaked emails showed air chiefs were told to stop choosing “useless white male pilots” in an attempt to improve diversity.

USELESS WHITE MALE PILOTS

As I said, I’m sure with Sir Keir Starmer’s glowing record for ‘two-tier justice’ as prime minister, hard feelings about the DEI purges will evaporate, and trust in his leadership will be so high that recruits willingly stream back into the British military.

WHEN PIGS FLY

What the RAF is doing now is basically cannibalizing troops already in the service, asking military members who haven’t yet reached their 24th birthday if they’d like to try to be a pilot.

…Candidates previously overlooked are now being urged to re-apply for training as the Air Force frantically tries to fill cockpits with combat-ready flyers, the Mail can reveal.

…The urgent need for pilots has become so pressing that air chiefs are actively encouraging older candidates, who have some level of flight experience, to sign up.

It has been reported that the Royal Air Force is suffering from a 30 per cent shortfall in pilots at the ranks of Flight Lieutenant and Squadron Leader. Officials RAF sources have challenged these statistics but have not produced their own.

It comes as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer pledged to put ‘jets in the sky’ to protect Ukraine as part of a post-conflict stabilisation force to be confirmed this week.

Starmer is committing assets to a Ukraine stabilization force he doesn’t exactly have yet.

…Last night, Shadow Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois, said: ‘The RAF’s availability of combat pilots has been hit by a perfect storm: including woke manipulation of recruiting practices, the revival of civilian airlines post-Covid and technical issues with training aircraft, particularly engine reliability on the Hawk T2.

‘All this really matters. If we are now going to see ‘jets in the sky’ defending any Ukrainian peace deal then we need enough trained pilots to fly them.

…To plug the shortfall, air chiefs want personnel from other branches of the RAF, who may previously have been rejected due to their scores in suitability assessments, to reapply.

The RAF Internal Briefing Note, dated March 5th, is titled ‘Opportunities for professional transfer to the pilot specialisation’.

It invites applications for transfer, stating ‘this is due to a higher number of pilots required for flying training’.

Applicants must submit their paperwork before their 24th birthday, although officers who have relevant experience in ‘flying-related roles’ can be older.

The previous ‘goals’ have been determined to be ‘unrealistic,’ and the courageous female group captain who refused to enforce the discriminatory policies was pilloried about the service. How nice.

…The RAF was also forced to admit its target for 40 per cent of the force to be female and 20 per cent from an ethnic minority background by 2030 was ‘unrealistic’.

Group Captain Lizzie Nicholl, at the time the RAF’s head of recruitment, refused to follow the order which she rightly stated was contrary to the Equality Act.

The probe found she was subjected to ‘significant and at times unreasonable’ pressure to push through the unlawful policy.

Pilots don’t fall out of coconut trees. Even the most ardent dreamer, who has wanted to be a pilot his entire life, may find that his/her first time up in a trainer at the yoke will gladly be their last.

They have a helluvan attrition rate in training, as our services know all too well.

This is going to be a struggle of a hole to plug, even if they can overcome the bad taste left in mouths.

The British Navy, at the beginning of the year, had so few sailors that it had to decommission two ships just to put enough bodies on new boats.

The Royal Navy has so few sailors that it has to decommission two warships to staff its new class of frigates, The Telegraph can reveal.

HMS Westminster, which was recently refurbished at huge expense to the taxpayer, and HMS Argyll will be decommissioned this year.

The crews will be sent to work across the new fleet of Type 26 frigates as they come into service.

It comes as the Armed Forces experience a significant recruitment crisis, with the Navy having suffered a collapse in the flow of new recruits into the service.

A defence source told The Telegraph: “We will have to take manpower from one area of the Navy in order to put into a new area of the force.”

The number of volunteers for military service has been looking exceptionally sour, which leads to its own related issues of viable assets being mothballed for lack of warm bodies. Only as long as you’re not in a shooting war can you afford that sort of storage.

…In the 12 months to March, MoD figures showed that the Navy, which has 29,000 full-time recruits, performed the worst out of the three services for recruitment.

Intake for the Navy and Royal Marines dropped 22.1 per cent compared with the previous year, while the RAF dropped by almost 17 per cent and the Army by nearly 15 per cent. Although the Government is planning to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, recruitment figures are still far below target.

Lord West, the former first sea lord, questioned why the Navy was decommissioning warships without having a new fleet ready to take over and warned that the UK’s warships were “dropping like flies”.

“We are losing operational ships – which is all very well as long as there’s no war in the next few years,” he said.

One older British retired general had heads exploding a few months ago when he flat-out said it’s going to come down to conscription to fill the ranks.

He echoed comments from former German defense minister Boris Pistorius over two years ago concerning the state of the German armed forces. Probably the single popular member of Olaf Scholz’s government, Pistorius was brand new to the job in March of 2023 when he said, ‘We don’t have enough of anything to do anything.’

German Defense Minister Pistorius:

We do not have an armed force capable of defending against an aggressor like Russia.

The German Army does not have the strength to defend its NATO allies as well.

Bundeswehr does not have enough personnel, ammunition, equipment and weapons. pic.twitter.com/8XIuaAqVcV

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 1, 2023

Two years later, the German armed forces are still in a bit of a pickle. As their new government forms, argues about lifting the debt brake to start the spending, and fights with Greens over their cut of it, recruiting soldiers for the Bundeswehr is going to be a slog. They are missing a ‘massive number of soldiers.’

They have so many holes to fill, and no one is getting any younger in the ranks who is still there.

An official report on the state of the German military painted a grim picture on Tuesday, with a whopping 28% of positions among the lower enlisted ranks unfilled as of the end of 2024.

The numbers were slightly better at higher service tiers, but the Bundeswehr was still missing nearly 20% of the required commissioned officers, the document said.

“At the same time, the Bundeswehr keeps growing older,” Defense Commissioner Eva Högl said. “While the average age was 32.4 years at the end of 2019, it grew to 34 years by the end of 2024.”

And, in a classic example of unpreparedness, part of the reason the government shoots down talk of ‘conscription’ besides everyone’s natural distaste for the concept, is that the Bundeswehr has shrunken so much that they haven’t the ability to spool up either in facilities or training personnel for an influx of that nature.

…There are currently 181,000 troops in Germany’s armed forces. But the country is in the middle of a push to massively upgrade and expand its military, including increasing the number of soldiers. Some have called for restoring the general conscription for males which was suspended in 2011.

But Commissioner Högl said simply reviving this system was “not a good idea.”

“This would be too much for the Bundeswehr to handle,” she told reporters while presenting her report in Berlin, noting that there were currently not enough available facilities and instructors.

Even though Defense Minister Högl says things have gotten ‘better’ since 2022, she repeats the Pistorius refrain of ‘too little of everything.’

France is getting $200M in aid ready for Ukraine, but they are also in the middle of pulling what’s left of their troops in Senegal out and the Ivory Coast has taken possession of the former French bases there after those troops returned home. 

As far as sending French troops to help Ukraine, if you judge by street protests, I have to say that’s the most French flags I’ve seen waving in a long time.

These folks are a no.

🇫🇷 WOW! Thousands of French patriots protested in Paris today against sending any further Military Aid to Ukraine. They also demanded that NO French troops are sent to Ukraine and called for President Macron to RESIGN.

This is HUGE! 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/SYKhtfpN1k

— Cillian (@CilComLFC) March 8, 2025

Macron is a lame-duck president with a government nearly in bankruptcy. This will take some work on his part.

…One option to swiftly boost military spending would be to reopen this year’s budget and adjust it.

But the current budget — which contained €53 billion in spending cuts and tax hikes aimed at reducing France’s soaring deficit, which reached 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2024 — took months to pass through France’s legislature and cost a prime minister his job.

Guns or Butter

France currently spends 2.1 percent of its GDP on its military annually — and Macron wants to get that figure to more than 3 percent. According to estimates by French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu, France’s military would ideally need a yearly budget of just under €100 billion — which would amount to finding about €30 billion more each year compared to what was previously foreseen by the military planning law passed in 2023.

That’s a quick round-up of issues in the big three.

As I said yesterday, Macron’s follow-up EU summit on the 17th is going to be interesting