A bit late in my reply but here it is: The problem with the EU ramping up a military bloc large, powerful and well enough equipped to be even roughly comparable

A bit late in my reply but here it is: The problem with the EU ramping up a military bloc large, powerful and well enough equipped to be even roughly comparable to the United States (or to China in terms of its impending military capabilities) isn't about human resources or fundamental technical capability. After all the EU has a larger, well educated population and enough of a young population created by immigrants to easily staff such a military power system. It also has the economic and technical capacity to do so, since as a whole it has an economy roughly the size of the U.S. economy. Thus none of these are major obstacles. Neither is geography an insurmountable difficulty, since the EU has only one major land border to defend, in the east and even that against a set of countries that are much poorer, weaker and much less populated than the EU/NATO states (despite their larger landmass). Raw resources could be a problem for the Union, because the EU has them to a much lesser degree than Russia or the U.S., but this could be partly solved by support from overseas (The U.S. for starters), and even partial protection of these seaborne imports by the globally powerful U.S. navy, which would likely be friendly. Also, the sophistication of the EU economy is such that it could likely do more with fewer materials than Russia, even if access to them became a problem. Thus with all the above covered, the biggest difficulty is in cohesion instead: The U.S. consists of 50 states and many different ethnic groups, but they almost universally and firmly submit to the central power and direction of the federal government along clearly , historically defined and well respected lines. They also have a long and mostly uniform history of getting along with each other as parts of this national whole (taking aside the 4 years of the Civil War, 162 years ago) On top of this, most people across the whole of the U.S. strongly identify with being American and defending their country. This by the way applies even to the first generation children of most immigrants, which is an impressive showing for the value assigned to American culture and liking it. The EU on the other hand consists of 27 mostly distinct countries, each with its own unique political, legal, social and economic history and attending sense of identity based on these. Neither the governments of these countries or their people consider themselves European first in the way Americans do. Getting them all to join together militarily in the same way as the U.S. would thus be incredibly hard, considering past animosities, the above-mentioned qualities and of course, simple resistance to economic sacrifice. Sure, EU member nations and their people superficially play along with the practices of supranational government while its convenient, but this could go out the window the minute it becomes really hard or dangerous. In a military context, much more so, and especially in a war scenario outside of the purely, urgently defensive.