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We still have German heavy precision manufacturing. Anything there is dual purpose by default. Glock, Heckler and Kock, Beretta - all EU manufacturers. You have the various soviet arms manufacturers in Eastern Europe. Not sure how fast airbus could produce rafalle and eurofighter airframes, but I am willing to bet it is way faster than any EU adversary would like. I am not sure about how fast we can produce nitro compounds that make boom - but with Bayer and Merck being German - I guess fast.
And hell - we have inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder coming trough the Balkans and the mediterranean.
We could supply Ukraine with material and people no one cares about to be wasted in their east for ages without breaking a sweat. For one reason on another we don't want to.
They've ran away to Europe because they didn't want no wars. How exactly do you propose to incentivize them to fight in another one? Promise them citizenship? You would need to make staying as an asylum seeker or an illegal a terrible experience first.
Just press gang all of them, they’ll stop coming or they’ll comply. Win-win.
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I agree. If Putin's plan is to run Germany out of machine tools, he isn't going to succeed. If the plan is to take advantage of the fundamental non-seriousness of the current German elite, he probably is.
The biggest known unknown is keeping the Russian factories going. We can see that Russia is still busting sanctions in order to import western-made spare parts - presumably because there are certain parts they need which don't have a direct Chinese equivalent (see the massive increase in German exports of machine tools to Kyrgyzstan - they aren't staying there!). We are already seeing Russian civilian airliners grounded due to lack of Western spare parts - does something similar happen to Russian shell-making machines if the EU gets serious about stopping back-channel sanctions-busting?
If the EU gets serious about stopping back-channel sanctions-busting their entire economy disintegrates overnight as they lose access to Russia-sourced fossil fuels. Right now they're paying a premium to India in order to evade the sanctions, but nothing was actually done to remove their dependence upon Russian energy. Right now Germany is subsidising domestic energy usage due to the massive cost spikes caused by the Ukraine war, and making that problem substantially worse is probably not going to do their manufacturing sector any favours.
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