The economics are hard to ignore. Shooting down a drone with AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system costs less than $10, using just two to five seconds of laser energy. Compare that to the interceptor missiles currently used against Iranian drone swarms, which cost orders of magnitude more and are in short supply across allied arsenals.
Retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson criticized Hegseth's rhetoric, stating, 'That's a necessary end to achieve goals through military force - you have to kill people to achieve them. That's not the end. It's a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.'
Defending the countries of Nato's eastern flank in the event of a potential Russian aggression would cost at least twelve hundred billion euros - twenty-four times more than the Polish defence budget. A free Ukraine, as part of the West, is our chance to render Russian imperialism toothless.
The Foreign Secretary said: "The Arctic is the gateway for Russia's Northern Fleet to be able to threaten the United Kingdom, to threaten Western Europe and Norway, to threaten the United States and Canada. "So it's a whole transatlantic security depends on our Arctic security," she added. Cooper explained that Nato needs to "double down" and "do what we've done in other areas", to make sure that "we really strengthen the security of the high north".
Germany's military, the Bundeswehr, is currently on a spending spree: it has more than 108 billion ($129 billion) at its disposal this year a gigantic, unprecedented sum. This is being financed both by the official federal budget and special funds, for which the state is taking out loans. This money is intended to make the Bundeswehr, which has been subject to decades of cutbacks, more powerful and modern. There is also time pressure.
At the beginning of the year, German men aged 18 began to receive a compulsory questionnaire registering their fitness for army service under a law passed last month. Joining the army is voluntary for now, but the law allows the government to introduce mandatory service to meet its goal of building what it says will be the strongest army in Europe for the first time since World War II.
