The Europeans have finally been woken up, about 30 years too late though.
During the Cold War, they had moderate defense budgets and fragmented, national protectionist industries where instead of leveraging their collective developmental and production capacity, looked at defense programs as ways to create redundant jobs for companies in each nation that participated in multinational consortiums.
The whole reason we PCS’d there in 1980 was to participate in the development of Future Fighter 1990, which became known as the ECA, then EFA, then Eurofighter Typhoon, and now just Typhoon. If you look through the contracting awards, you’ll see the participating nations making the same subsystems in a lot of areas, rather than one country making this, and another making that. That’s more true with simple stuff like ammo drums, certain structures, and things that aren’t as advanced.
Here we are 45 years later, and the freaking Typhoon still doesn’t have an AESA Radar. Cockpit layout had too many cooks in the kitchen, so the systems are not well placed for natural man-machine interface. It’s a great aircraft, but suffered at the hands of feminists in parliaments cutting its funding, while committees of British, German, Spanish, and Italian engineers fought over how it would be designed and developed.
It’s kind of a microcosm of the whole collective European defense posture.
A fews countries did take their defense seriously since the 1990s, namely Finland, Poland, and Norway. Germany, the UK, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark bought into the whole “It’s the end of history!” insanity.
The problem is, when you embrace weakness, you invite someone to attack you and make conflict more inevitable. When you maintain strength, it acts as a major deterrent to aggressors. Europe failed to do this.
While they invested restricted amounts of money in aging technology, the US had already moved onto the next thing. The ATF program was funded starting in 1981.
ASTOVL started receiving secret funding in 1983.
ATF became the F-22A. ASTOVL became the F-35B. There were 5 other programs besides ASTOVL that rolled into JSF-A and JSF-C, which are the F-35A and F-35C.