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.'
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.
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.
Britain's nuclear deterrent must be genuinely, verifiably ours not dependent on Trump or whoever his successor may be. Trump has proven we can't rely on America as a dependable ally. As the UK now prepares to replace Trident in the 2040s, we should make the decision now to spend the billions required over the next two decades here in the UK, not in the US.
France has offered to 'extend' its nuclear umbrella to other European countries without actually 'sharing' it. How can that work, asks John Lichfield. This will be the subject of a speech by President Emmanuel Macron in the next two weeks which could be one of the most important speeches in European history. Or a damp squib. Macron has promised to update France's nuclear doctrine. In other words, he will revisit the rules which have governed use of France's force de frappe or nuclear deterrent
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".
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.
