21 ms·

European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

134 points by saubeidl 1y ago

jacquesm 1y ago
There will be a lot more decisions like this one. For the war in Ukraine and anything immediate they will buy American stuff if there is no EU alternative (and for many things there just isn't right now, there are too many dependencies). But the tide has changed, for 'in' it is now to 'out'. It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. Besides the obvious problems with the political system internally to the USA I think it is the external effects that drive decisions like these. I see the same happening with choices about other suppliers. The EU is a very large trading partner to the US and what is happening right now is unprecedented in the last 75 years or more. The damage to our future world order is incalculable and the fact that it all seems to be by design bothers me greatly. The lyrics of Alan Parson's 'Children of the moon' have been spooking through my head lately.
- macintux 1y ago
  I don't disagree with your theme, but I think in this case it has less to do with the grenades Trump is randomly exploding and more to do with the E-7 simply being the wrong solution.
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    In the past it was useful for nations to opt for an American solution even if it wasn’t the most optimal precisely because of America being a dependable and trustworthy ally.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      One could also phrase it more cynically as protection money. Now that no more protection is offered, there's no point in spending the money.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        That's a good point.
      - lukan 1y ago
        Well this was quite openly communicated, why germany bought the F35 for example. To still get (nuclear) protection. (with the homebuild Tornados phasing out and the Eurofighter not getting a licence so easy, only the F35 is capable of delivering nukes with german pilots). But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.
        walletdrainer 1y ago
        The F35 is also just a much better plane.
        jleyank 1y ago
        The F35 is a fighter-bomber/light-bomber. Others are air superiority platforms. Different tools for different situations.
        walletdrainer 1y ago
        F35 has far better bvr capabilities than the eurofighter and in practice ends up being far more useful in the air superiority role. Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything. In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar. There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kampfly/-typevalg-af-danmarks-kommende-kampfly-reduceret-vers-20160509-.pdf https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...
        1y ago
    - barbazoo 1y ago
      That sounds like such a made up thing. Any source to back that up?
      - throw_a_grenade 1y ago
        I won't be put in (public) writing, but it's a same thing as “no-one gets fired for buying IBM”. Sometimes it's part of a bigger international agreement, like, you buy food and we buy weapons or sth.
    - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
      Or more realistically because no one else actually produces enough missile or bullets to shoot. It's like France being such a joke right now suggesting that Ukraine use their missile system instead of the USA's. Oh France sure how long until you can supply a fraction of what we are buying from the USA? What a decade!?!?! Ukraine won't exist in a decade if we wait and what's that you won't even ramp production unless you can get guarantees from multiple member nations? What a joke.
  - wbl 1y ago
    How is the E-7 the wrong solution? It's worked fine for Australia.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    That may well be, but if there had been a different person in the White House (or what's left of it) they would have most likely bought it anyway. They're just not going to come out and say it but the 'strategic' element is what points to that, I doubt the US would have withdrawn in Juli if not for Trump, Hegseth and their buddies. This is just one more program they've gutted. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-wedgetail-citing-survivability-and-cost-concerns/ https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-we...
- usrnm 1y ago
  > The damage to our future world order I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    What do you like about it, specifically?
  - kogus 1y ago
    As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms. If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      I wouldn't say it was weakness rather than a sense of disgust about anything war related. Europe is tired of it, and precisely because of that may well end up in another major war.
      - bix6 1y ago
        That has more to do with their geography than their disgust no?
        Yoric 1y ago
        I think GP means that Europe didn't intervene when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and, more generally, has done its best to limit rearmament until now. And we're going to pay for it by having a war against Russia that we might have avoided had we projected more strength. The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.
- askchina 1y ago
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  - saubeidl 1y ago
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- askchina 1y ago
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  - tomhow 1y ago
    It's against the guidelines to post flamebait and engage in political battle on HN, and that includes making inflammatory assertions about national/regional governments/leaders. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nxor 1y ago
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  - CoastalCoder 1y ago
    FYI, I'm not seeing how this relates to the story or discussion. That might explain the current downvotes.
    - nxor 1y ago
      Obviously it's about the symbolism. I think it's great Europe is breaking away from the US. I just think it's a crazy turn from their previous obsession with the US.
  - saghm 1y ago
    Europe isn't unified in the same sense as the US though, so this feels like a bit of an apples and oranges situation. Even though the US is varied geographically and culturally from an internal perspective, it's very much not in the sense of how the government conducts foreign policy and international trade. From the perspective of a European government pondering a trade deal, the differences between North Dakota and California aren't necessarily going to be super relevant, let alone the differences of various people within those states. This isn't really comparable to how things work in reverse; there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states.
    - petcat 1y ago
      > there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states. And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.
      - saghm 1y ago
- eduction 1y ago
  > It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed. What has changed is the US has become more realistic and up front about the limitations of its reduced military. It’s not healthy, for the US /or/ Europe, to indulge the imperial fantasy that US forces in Europe (token deployments in Germany and Poland) are sufficient to defend against Russian attack. Trump is not the first US president to push Europe to do more of precisely what it is doing here (spend its own money on defense). Being clear about limits is what a reliable ally does. Europe ordering an Airbus AWACS instead of Boeing now that the US stopped subsidizing them is not surprising nor does it mean the sky is falling.
  - lukan 1y ago
    "An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed" What changed is the US President saying things like, he will encourage Putin to invade countries not spending so much on military. What also changed is the US President threatening members of the EU militarily over greenland for example. Reliable allies don't really do that. (you probably do not realize the shock Denmark felt over this, that went deep and the change will not happen over night, but it will happen)
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      There's also no guarantees that the current president or administration would honor those NATO obligations if Article 5 is called. The president has repeatedly been vocal about the US leaving NATO as a possibility. If I were the EU, I certainly wouldn't be counting on the US honoring any of its agreements and I'd be planning with the assumption that they will not join a NATO response.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    I don't think that the sky is falling. However, I think that many in the US are underestimating the current paradigm shift. Right now, in Europe, leaders and voters need to take decisions while keeping in mind the possibility that the US will invade Canada and Greenland while not reacting if Russia movies to Estonia. Will it happen? Who the f*k knows? Donald Trump has made declarations very much in this direction. Also, Donald Trump has broken a sufficiently large number of treaties since becoming president that _anything_ should be considered possible. That being said, as you mention, it's not clear that any of this is in any way related to Europe not buying the E-7.
- poszlem 1y ago
  Instead of viewing the current world order as collapsing, it's more accurate to see this as a transitional period. The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator, the US, making change inevitable. A significant reduction in the quality of life for many in the 'so-called West' appears to be the unfortunate price of the world returning to a more 'normal' historical pattern of international relations.
  - Barrin92 1y ago
    >The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator I don't think that's true. The policy of alliance building and containment of their largest peer and competitor still makes sense. It was how the US ultimately overcame the Soviet Union, and is even more vital given the size and talent in China. A US without an alliance system will not win that competition. What's much more concerning is that the rational interests of the US as a nation aren't reflected in its policy making any more. The 20th century had its share of domestic issues but the inmates weren't running the asylum as far as foreign politics was concerned which was coherent.
    - dmix 1y ago
      European countries becoming more capable of defending themselves by scaling up their own military instead of being dependent on a foreign power will only harden containment of bad actors. That applies to my country Canada. What's much riskier to the world is the US having to take the brunt of defending Europe, the Arctic front, and dealing with a conflict in China (which is far far more serious military threat than Russia in 2025). It's difficult medicine to swallow but that's the realpolitiks of it.
      - saubeidl 1y ago
        China might be a threat to the US, but I don't see it being a threat to Europe. The fact that Americans are abandoning us in our struggle with Russia in order to pick a fight with China makes it hard to see them as reliable allies.
- philwelch 1y ago
  > It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    That's a borderline whataboutism statement. Yes, Germany could have done a lot better. But at least they're not actively trying to sabotage NATO, they're not threatening to invade allies and they're not bombing other countries just because they can.
    - philwelch 1y ago
      Germany also spend the last couple decades buying as much Russian natural gas as possible, even to the extent of decommissioning their nuclear power plants, and only really stopped when someone (probably Ukraine) destroyed their pipelines. They also pressured the rest of Europe to admit a surge of ‘refugees’ that has incited a populist backlash and very likely materially damaged the national security of almost every European country, many of which already have fully endemic terror cells (e.g. the one in Belgium responsible for the Paris attacks in 2015). The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament. Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
      - 1y ago
- torginus 1y ago
  And weirdly enough, most of the sanctions have been softened, or rolled back - there's been little effort on the US side to build up domestic production capability outside of semiconductors - a process that began well under the Biden admin. Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Turns out even if you have as much power as the US president with their executive orders, if you start making stupid or insufficiently well-prepared policy decisions, you have to roll them back or your country will crash into the ground. Kind of makes me think that supposedly autocratic leaders of powerful countries have much less power than we thought - once they make a couple stupid decisions, their countries start going down the drain.
  - jmye 1y ago
    > Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Only a tiny fraction of the S&P is performing, and it's because it's either part of the AI bubble or because people have memed extreme value into poorly run companies that now have absolutely insane EPS numbers. There's nothing about the US stock market that's even slightly connected to it's financial or economic performance, right now.
- w10-1 1y ago
  An independent Europe is easier for China to dominate. Now that NATO is in question, you'll start to hear about US manipulation of the SWIFT banking system, so Europe will start pushing for an international one, which China will eventually control.
  - WanderPanda 1y ago
    SWIFT is Belgian, though?
    - paganel 1y ago
      It’s just a detail, the international financial market/banking system is basically under active US control, just look at what happened to Wegelin & Co. (at that point the oldest bank in Switzerland) when they thought that that was not the case.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Both parties in the US will celebrate the EU being more independent militarily. We are in a multipolar world with the dominance of China incoming and the western nations need to spread capability.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  It is kinda funny that to become "independent" the EU is going to become even more dependent on the USA while saying at some undetermined future point they will be able to pivot to independence (which we all know is never going to happen).
- Havoc 1y ago
  This is why the aukus thing puzzles me. Thats a huge longterm bet on the US being reliable
macintux 1y ago
Sounds like the USAF decided last year that the E-7 was the wrong approach (too expensive, more interested in a distributed solution), so this isn't terribly surprising.
- deleted 1y ago
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- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  The first could e-7a aren't even slated to have particularly good radars. The US kept trying to do whatever it takes to get the price down & it keeps being hideously expensive anyways, with who knows what capabilities left on the cutting room floor. There was a request for information that went out in April, asking, hey, uh, if we do want to make this an actually good awacs, what should we do with the platform? https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/air-force-eyes-advanced-e-7-wedgetail-with-upgrades-including-new-radar/ https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/air-force-eyes-advanced-... Seems incredibly silly to me that such an incredibly crucial capability is being so sorely neglected. Having superior signals has loon been a key US advantage, that's core to enabling so many other capabilities to be used well. Theres what feels like absurd fantasy going around saying we can skip airborne platforms & just use space for all awacs needs. And who knows maybe, but it feels like a lot of ridiculous wish casting, that's leaving us with horrendous woefully inadequate eyes, ears, & links today. We need a real e-7 plan, one with a really good sensors not the decades old tech that the US's E-7A defined.
fxtentacle 1y ago
The EU is worried about Trump being unpredictable, so they are pushing hard for sovereignty. See their initiatives to leave US clouds. This decision is completely in line with that strategy and, probably, also what the US military expected to happen.
- eCa 1y ago
  > leave US clouds The pressure to leave US controlled cloud providers actually started way back with the US Cloud Act. I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services.
  - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
    > I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services. Europe can't seem to get a tech sector bootstrapped no matter what it does and European governments seem to be much more comfortable with the USA having full access to everything they do then risk running on a EU cloud.
SilverElfin 1y ago
Geopolitically this rift between the US and EU is great for adversaries like Russia and China.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump. Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us. Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?
  - tr352 1y ago
    The EU needs China. No green deal without Chinese batteries, solar cells and rare earth metals.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      And China needs the EU. No rising Chinese middle class without the world's largest wealthy consumer market. A match made in heaven ;)
      - lm28469 1y ago
        Like Russia's gas and Germany's industry ;) Or the EU relying on the US army for defense ;) We're not in the post ww2 world illusion or world peace through commerce, mutual dependencies clearly don't stop nationalist interests. Trump shattered the illusion with his illegal meme tier tariffs, now we're slowly going back to empires dealing with their friends while fucking over anyone else.
        saubeidl 1y ago
        There is no conflict in our nationalist interests though. We are too far apart, unless we split up Russia between us...
      - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
petcat 1y ago
> The decision follows the withdrawal of the U.S. from the joint AWACS replacement program in July 2024, which left the initiative without its strategic and financial foundation. Is this implying that USA was paying for it previously? It sounds like they're blaming "noise polution", but also that they're not getting the planes for free anymore?
- krige 1y ago
  No. Europeans were paying for theirs but, once US backed out of their own purchases, the cost per unit rose sharply and was no longer sustainable.
  - petcat 1y ago
    I see so this isn't really a concerted effort by EU nations to gain independence on defense technology. It's just that USA didn't want to buy the planes anymore so it became too expensive for everyone else to as well.
    - krige 1y ago
      Or perhaps pulling out of the program was too costly, political or otherwise, for EU and USA did them a huge favor by blundering away from it first, freeing them to pursue their goals.
  - jijijijij 1y ago
    Europeans were blown off, when America unexpectedly pulled out like a Boeing door.
    - kyboren 1y ago
      I'm quite impressed with Europeans' entitled attitudes towards the US security umbrella. First of all, none of this should be "unexpected"--Obama famously announced a pivot to Asia well over a decade ago. What exactly did Europeans think that meant? Second, European military intransigence has dramatically escalated the risk of a devastating war affecting both US and Europe, and the US is simply overextended. The US cannot bring sufficient military power to bear to defend the Pacific, European, and Arctic theaters simultaneously. European NATO members simply must pull their own weight now; reaffirming European luxury beliefs like "we don't need to prepare for war because Uncle Sam has got us covered" would be doing both US and Europe a dis-service. Many presidents have tried more polite pleading and cajoling in less critical times, with evidently poor results. Finally, the asymmetry of expectations is remarkable. Europeans clearly expect the US not just to fight Russia with them, but to fight Russia for them. Yet no Americans expect European forces to come to the US's rescue in the Pacific--and European commenters online make very clear that that expectation is correct. Consequently, many Americans are skeptical of the value NATO membership brings, while seeing clearly its risks and costs. If you want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get much more serious about fielding an effective military force and clearly commit to helping the US against China in every way possible. And if you don't want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get even more serious about fielding an effective military force. So put your heads down, get to work, and quit it with the hyperbolic butthurt comments about "unexpectedly" being "blown off".
bediger4000 1y ago
What effect does this have on Boeing, one of 3-4 major defense companies. Can the industry handle one more giant meger? Can it handle a vastly impoverished Boeing?
cjrp 1y ago
Presumably the alternative is the SAAB GlobalEye?
- Y-bar 1y ago
  Seems so, but perhaps some nations like France want a bigger variant with a bit more range and larger sensors. Airbus A330 is already used by European fighters for aerial refuelling so I suppose it could also be built into an AWACS.
mlmonkey 1y ago
> The decision follows US's decision to withdraw from some joint AWACS treaty in July 2024 So... can't really blame Trump.
- Etheryte 1y ago
  The article doesn't mention Trump anywhere?
drooopy 1y ago
It requires some level of skill and talent to be able to cause this amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. Throughout my 40 years on this planet, Pax Americana was a constant that seemed to hold the world together (+/-). It's scary to see it vanish and with such speed and efficiency.
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  The world was somewhat sympathetic to the US when we elected Trump the first time: it's disappointing, but you can get tricked sometimes. When we re-elected him it casts the first time as not an error, but rather a deliberate choice. A nation that makes that kind of choice is not a reliable ally. We're just beginning to see the repercussions of that loss of trust.
- fransje26 1y ago
  > It requires some level of skill and talent to be able to cause this amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. The art of the deal.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  > amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. Has that happened? Give us something concrete a real example of that. Europe seems to be increasing it's dependency on the USA with large military spendings. They bent the knee really quickly during the last round of trade talks.... If this is a damaged USA's soft power what we've really learned is that we've been wildly overestimating other countries.
petesergeant 1y ago
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qwertox 1y ago
So new tariffs coming in, because it goes against the agreement.
mikewarot 1y ago
I wouldn't put all my eggs on a single billion dollar basket like that in 2025. A networked flock of million dollar drones with phased array radar could be cheaper, more effective, thanks to a larger virtual aperture, and far more survivable an overwatch resource. You could stagger refueling and have it available 24/7.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures? Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm. Will be cool though.
  - mikewarot 1y ago
    Atomic clocks are now less than $5000 devices. The same type of circuits that allow GPS receivers to correlate timing to the picosecond could be used in this application. None of what I suggested is fantasy, but it would require good engineering. What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate most stealth coatings and bounce off the airframes of the enemy.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      Yes, every separate component is doable. What looks hardest to me is the geometry: every node / drone would not only need to be perfectly synchronized with the rest of the swarm, but also understand its location within it with millimeter precision, in order to time its impulse to do beamforming, or allow locating any received signals. We should assume that near the battlefield GPS is already jammed, so it must be a sophisticated network of laser rangefinders between the drones, plus location data from land stations. Then, there should be a super-node in a larger aircraft that would receive the data from the swarm and turn it into a coherent picture, run object detection and tracking, etc.
nicholasbraker 1y ago
Let's hope a decision on an alternative platform is made quickly (although I am sceptical due to the bureaucratic maze of NATO procurement). The current AWACS-platform (E-3A) still uses old engines which are loud, smokey and not as efficient. Neighbouring communities deserve a quieter platform as well as NATO needs a potent airborne early warning platform. European technology is not an issue (Thales, Leonardo etc. make great modern AESA based radars). Also interoperability of data between NATO members used in the C2 chain is not an issue.
zeristor 1y ago
An interesting angle. Seemingly the USAF was about to buy E-7 Wedgetail aircraft, but according to Wikipedia, they think it would be a better idea to use satellites. This isn’t an angle I had thought of before, and there must be many satellites required to support that. I’ll try and research more into this.

134 points by saubeidl 1y ago

There will be a lot more decisions like this one. For the war in Ukraine and anything immediate they will buy American stuff if there is no EU alternative (and for many things there just isn't right now, there are too many dependencies). But the tide has changed, for 'in' it is now to 'out'. It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. Besides the obvious problems with the political system internally to the USA I think it is the external effects that drive decisions like these. I see the same happening with choices about other suppliers. The EU is a very large trading partner to the US and what is happening right now is unprecedented in the last 75 years or more. The damage to our future world order is incalculable and the fact that it all seems to be by design bothers me greatly. The lyrics of Alan Parson's 'Children of the moon' have been spooking through my head lately.

macintux 1y ago
I don't disagree with your theme, but I think in this case it has less to do with the grenades Trump is randomly exploding and more to do with the E-7 simply being the wrong solution.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  In the past it was useful for nations to opt for an American solution even if it wasn’t the most optimal precisely because of America being a dependable and trustworthy ally.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    One could also phrase it more cynically as protection money. Now that no more protection is offered, there's no point in spending the money.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      That's a good point.
    - lukan 1y ago
      Well this was quite openly communicated, why germany bought the F35 for example. To still get (nuclear) protection. (with the homebuild Tornados phasing out and the Eurofighter not getting a licence so easy, only the F35 is capable of delivering nukes with german pilots). But I think it was a pretty bad appeasement deal.
      - walletdrainer 1y ago
        The F35 is also just a much better plane.
        jleyank 1y ago
        The F35 is a fighter-bomber/light-bomber. Others are air superiority platforms. Different tools for different situations.
        walletdrainer 1y ago
        F35 has far better bvr capabilities than the eurofighter and in practice ends up being far more useful in the air superiority role. Eurofighter is really only good for peacetime patrols, the F35 will detect and shoot down enemies in real conflict far before the Eurofighter can do anything. In a bizarre hypothetical conflict you would certainly not want to engage a F35 in an Eurofighter, the Eurofighter would be knocked out of the sky long before it could even see the F35. It certainly couldn’t turn on it’s radar. There are extensive public studies available from e.g. the Danish government that ended up with the conclusion that the F35 is far superior in air-to-air combat. https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kampfly/-typevalg-af-danmarks-kommende-kampfly-reduceret-vers-20160509-.pdf https://www.fmn.dk/globalassets/fmn/dokumenter/strategi/kamp...
        1y ago
  - barbazoo 1y ago
    That sounds like such a made up thing. Any source to back that up?
    - throw_a_grenade 1y ago
      I won't be put in (public) writing, but it's a same thing as “no-one gets fired for buying IBM”. Sometimes it's part of a bigger international agreement, like, you buy food and we buy weapons or sth.
  - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
    Or more realistically because no one else actually produces enough missile or bullets to shoot. It's like France being such a joke right now suggesting that Ukraine use their missile system instead of the USA's. Oh France sure how long until you can supply a fraction of what we are buying from the USA? What a decade!?!?! Ukraine won't exist in a decade if we wait and what's that you won't even ramp production unless you can get guarantees from multiple member nations? What a joke.
- wbl 1y ago
  How is the E-7 the wrong solution? It's worked fine for Australia.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That may well be, but if there had been a different person in the White House (or what's left of it) they would have most likely bought it anyway. They're just not going to come out and say it but the 'strategic' element is what points to that, I doubt the US would have withdrawn in Juli if not for Trump, Hegseth and their buddies. This is just one more program they've gutted. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-wedgetail-citing-survivability-and-cost-concerns/ https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/air-force-cancels-e-7-we...
usrnm 1y ago
> The damage to our future world order I don't think "damage" is the right word, especially outside of the US. Changes aren't necessarily bad, and, as someone living in the EU, I actually like the current trend.
- mmooss 1y ago
  What do you like about it, specifically?
- kogus 1y ago
  As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms. If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral destruction. There is no intrinsic reason that the US should take the lead on, say, policy toward Russia. Quite the opposite.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I wouldn't say it was weakness rather than a sense of disgust about anything war related. Europe is tired of it, and precisely because of that may well end up in another major war.
    - bix6 1y ago
      That has more to do with their geography than their disgust no?
      - Yoric 1y ago
        I think GP means that Europe didn't intervene when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and, more generally, has done its best to limit rearmament until now. And we're going to pay for it by having a war against Russia that we might have avoided had we projected more strength. The precedent being France and UK that were so disgusted by war after WWI (and recall that France was the historical biggest warmonger among Western nations at least since the second half of the Hundred Years War) that they didn't react to Nazi Germany annexing Austria, then invading Sudetenland, and in fact not even when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Had they reacted earlier, WWII might have been avoided.
askchina 1y ago
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- saubeidl 1y ago
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askchina 1y ago
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- tomhow 1y ago
  It's against the guidelines to post flamebait and engage in political battle on HN, and that includes making inflammatory assertions about national/regional governments/leaders. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nxor 1y ago
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- CoastalCoder 1y ago
  FYI, I'm not seeing how this relates to the story or discussion. That might explain the current downvotes.
  - nxor 1y ago
    Obviously it's about the symbolism. I think it's great Europe is breaking away from the US. I just think it's a crazy turn from their previous obsession with the US.
- saghm 1y ago
  Europe isn't unified in the same sense as the US though, so this feels like a bit of an apples and oranges situation. Even though the US is varied geographically and culturally from an internal perspective, it's very much not in the sense of how the government conducts foreign policy and international trade. From the perspective of a European government pondering a trade deal, the differences between North Dakota and California aren't necessarily going to be super relevant, let alone the differences of various people within those states. This isn't really comparable to how things work in reverse; there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states.
  - petcat 1y ago
    > there's no "president of Europe" who can unilaterally decide to put a bunch of tariffs on anything imported from the US into Europe without regard to how it affects the individual member states. And it's not even clear if it's legal in the US. The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding that after a dozen US states sued about it.
    - saghm 1y ago
eduction 1y ago
> It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed. What has changed is the US has become more realistic and up front about the limitations of its reduced military. It’s not healthy, for the US /or/ Europe, to indulge the imperial fantasy that US forces in Europe (token deployments in Germany and Poland) are sufficient to defend against Russian attack. Trump is not the first US president to push Europe to do more of precisely what it is doing here (spend its own money on defense). Being clear about limits is what a reliable ally does. Europe ordering an Airbus AWACS instead of Boeing now that the US stopped subsidizing them is not surprising nor does it mean the sky is falling.
- lukan 1y ago
  "An extreme and inaccurate statement. The US is still party to NATO Article 5, meaning the blood of our young people is pledged to be shed to defend, say, Estonia. That has not changed" What changed is the US President saying things like, he will encourage Putin to invade countries not spending so much on military. What also changed is the US President threatening members of the EU militarily over greenland for example. Reliable allies don't really do that. (you probably do not realize the shock Denmark felt over this, that went deep and the change will not happen over night, but it will happen)
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    There's also no guarantees that the current president or administration would honor those NATO obligations if Article 5 is called. The president has repeatedly been vocal about the US leaving NATO as a possibility. If I were the EU, I certainly wouldn't be counting on the US honoring any of its agreements and I'd be planning with the assumption that they will not join a NATO response.
- Yoric 1y ago
  I don't think that the sky is falling. However, I think that many in the US are underestimating the current paradigm shift. Right now, in Europe, leaders and voters need to take decisions while keeping in mind the possibility that the US will invade Canada and Greenland while not reacting if Russia movies to Estonia. Will it happen? Who the f*k knows? Donald Trump has made declarations very much in this direction. Also, Donald Trump has broken a sufficiently large number of treaties since becoming president that _anything_ should be considered possible. That being said, as you mention, it's not clear that any of this is in any way related to Europe not buying the E-7.
poszlem 1y ago
Instead of viewing the current world order as collapsing, it's more accurate to see this as a transitional period. The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator, the US, making change inevitable. A significant reduction in the quality of life for many in the 'so-called West' appears to be the unfortunate price of the world returning to a more 'normal' historical pattern of international relations.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >The system established after WWII no longer serves the interests of its main creator I don't think that's true. The policy of alliance building and containment of their largest peer and competitor still makes sense. It was how the US ultimately overcame the Soviet Union, and is even more vital given the size and talent in China. A US without an alliance system will not win that competition. What's much more concerning is that the rational interests of the US as a nation aren't reflected in its policy making any more. The 20th century had its share of domestic issues but the inmates weren't running the asylum as far as foreign politics was concerned which was coherent.
  - dmix 1y ago
    European countries becoming more capable of defending themselves by scaling up their own military instead of being dependent on a foreign power will only harden containment of bad actors. That applies to my country Canada. What's much riskier to the world is the US having to take the brunt of defending Europe, the Arctic front, and dealing with a conflict in China (which is far far more serious military threat than Russia in 2025). It's difficult medicine to swallow but that's the realpolitiks of it.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      China might be a threat to the US, but I don't see it being a threat to Europe. The fact that Americans are abandoning us in our struggle with Russia in order to pick a fight with China makes it hard to see them as reliable allies.
philwelch 1y ago
> It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure. This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That's a borderline whataboutism statement. Yes, Germany could have done a lot better. But at least they're not actively trying to sabotage NATO, they're not threatening to invade allies and they're not bombing other countries just because they can.
  - philwelch 1y ago
    Germany also spend the last couple decades buying as much Russian natural gas as possible, even to the extent of decommissioning their nuclear power plants, and only really stopped when someone (probably Ukraine) destroyed their pipelines. They also pressured the rest of Europe to admit a surge of ‘refugees’ that has incited a populist backlash and very likely materially damaged the national security of almost every European country, many of which already have fully endemic terror cells (e.g. the one in Belgium responsible for the Paris attacks in 2015). The US has spent years begging, pleading, cajoling, and now threatening the Europeans to take responsibility for the defense of their own continent. It took the outbreak of war in Ukraine for anyone in Europe west of Warsaw to even start considering rearmament. Also, the shitty anti-American attitude from Western Europe isn’t anything new, it existed for decades before Trump seriously entered politics. I’m just speculating here, since none of us actually know what’s said between world leaders behind closed doors, but the US wants Western Europe to rearm and Western Europe’s leaders probably recognized the necessity of doing so in 2022, so it’s pretty convenient for all parties involved that they can pretend they’re doing it to spite America rather than at America’s request.
    - 1y ago
torginus 1y ago
And weirdly enough, most of the sanctions have been softened, or rolled back - there's been little effort on the US side to build up domestic production capability outside of semiconductors - a process that began well under the Biden admin. Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Turns out even if you have as much power as the US president with their executive orders, if you start making stupid or insufficiently well-prepared policy decisions, you have to roll them back or your country will crash into the ground. Kind of makes me think that supposedly autocratic leaders of powerful countries have much less power than we thought - once they make a couple stupid decisions, their countries start going down the drain.
- jmye 1y ago
  > Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's Only a tiny fraction of the S&P is performing, and it's because it's either part of the AI bubble or because people have memed extreme value into poorly run companies that now have absolutely insane EPS numbers. There's nothing about the US stock market that's even slightly connected to it's financial or economic performance, right now.
w10-1 1y ago
An independent Europe is easier for China to dominate. Now that NATO is in question, you'll start to hear about US manipulation of the SWIFT banking system, so Europe will start pushing for an international one, which China will eventually control.
- WanderPanda 1y ago
  SWIFT is Belgian, though?
  - paganel 1y ago
    It’s just a detail, the international financial market/banking system is basically under active US control, just look at what happened to Wegelin & Co. (at that point the oldest bank in Switzerland) when they thought that that was not the case.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
Both parties in the US will celebrate the EU being more independent militarily. We are in a multipolar world with the dominance of China incoming and the western nations need to spread capability.
tick_tock_tick 1y ago
It is kinda funny that to become "independent" the EU is going to become even more dependent on the USA while saying at some undetermined future point they will be able to pivot to independence (which we all know is never going to happen).
Havoc 1y ago
This is why the aukus thing puzzles me. Thats a huge longterm bet on the US being reliable

macintux 1y ago

Sounds like the USAF decided last year that the E-7 was the wrong approach (too expensive, more interested in a distributed solution), so this isn't terribly surprising.

deleted 1y ago
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jauntywundrkind 1y ago
The first could e-7a aren't even slated to have particularly good radars. The US kept trying to do whatever it takes to get the price down & it keeps being hideously expensive anyways, with who knows what capabilities left on the cutting room floor. There was a request for information that went out in April, asking, hey, uh, if we do want to make this an actually good awacs, what should we do with the platform? https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/air-force-eyes-advanced-e-7-wedgetail-with-upgrades-including-new-radar/ https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/air-force-eyes-advanced-... Seems incredibly silly to me that such an incredibly crucial capability is being so sorely neglected. Having superior signals has loon been a key US advantage, that's core to enabling so many other capabilities to be used well. Theres what feels like absurd fantasy going around saying we can skip airborne platforms & just use space for all awacs needs. And who knows maybe, but it feels like a lot of ridiculous wish casting, that's leaving us with horrendous woefully inadequate eyes, ears, & links today. We need a real e-7 plan, one with a really good sensors not the decades old tech that the US's E-7A defined.

fxtentacle 1y ago

The EU is worried about Trump being unpredictable, so they are pushing hard for sovereignty. See their initiatives to leave US clouds. This decision is completely in line with that strategy and, probably, also what the US military expected to happen.

eCa 1y ago
> leave US clouds The pressure to leave US controlled cloud providers actually started way back with the US Cloud Act. I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  > I’ve been surprised that that process has been as slow as it has been, especially for the public sector and adjacent services. Europe can't seem to get a tech sector bootstrapped no matter what it does and European governments seem to be much more comfortable with the USA having full access to everything they do then risk running on a EU cloud.

SilverElfin 1y ago

Geopolitically this rift between the US and EU is great for adversaries like Russia and China.

saubeidl 1y ago
The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump. Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us. Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?
- tr352 1y ago
  The EU needs China. No green deal without Chinese batteries, solar cells and rare earth metals.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    And China needs the EU. No rising Chinese middle class without the world's largest wealthy consumer market. A match made in heaven ;)
    - lm28469 1y ago
      Like Russia's gas and Germany's industry ;) Or the EU relying on the US army for defense ;) We're not in the post ww2 world illusion or world peace through commerce, mutual dependencies clearly don't stop nationalist interests. Trump shattered the illusion with his illegal meme tier tariffs, now we're slowly going back to empires dealing with their friends while fucking over anyone else.
      - saubeidl 1y ago
        There is no conflict in our nationalist interests though. We are too far apart, unless we split up Russia between us...
    - tick_tock_tick 1y ago

petcat 1y ago

> The decision follows the withdrawal of the U.S. from the joint AWACS replacement program in July 2024, which left the initiative without its strategic and financial foundation. Is this implying that USA was paying for it previously? It sounds like they're blaming "noise polution", but also that they're not getting the planes for free anymore?

krige 1y ago
No. Europeans were paying for theirs but, once US backed out of their own purchases, the cost per unit rose sharply and was no longer sustainable.
- petcat 1y ago
  I see so this isn't really a concerted effort by EU nations to gain independence on defense technology. It's just that USA didn't want to buy the planes anymore so it became too expensive for everyone else to as well.
  - krige 1y ago
    Or perhaps pulling out of the program was too costly, political or otherwise, for EU and USA did them a huge favor by blundering away from it first, freeing them to pursue their goals.
- jijijijij 1y ago
  Europeans were blown off, when America unexpectedly pulled out like a Boeing door.
  - kyboren 1y ago
    I'm quite impressed with Europeans' entitled attitudes towards the US security umbrella. First of all, none of this should be "unexpected"--Obama famously announced a pivot to Asia well over a decade ago. What exactly did Europeans think that meant? Second, European military intransigence has dramatically escalated the risk of a devastating war affecting both US and Europe, and the US is simply overextended. The US cannot bring sufficient military power to bear to defend the Pacific, European, and Arctic theaters simultaneously. European NATO members simply must pull their own weight now; reaffirming European luxury beliefs like "we don't need to prepare for war because Uncle Sam has got us covered" would be doing both US and Europe a dis-service. Many presidents have tried more polite pleading and cajoling in less critical times, with evidently poor results. Finally, the asymmetry of expectations is remarkable. Europeans clearly expect the US not just to fight Russia with them, but to fight Russia for them. Yet no Americans expect European forces to come to the US's rescue in the Pacific--and European commenters online make very clear that that expectation is correct. Consequently, many Americans are skeptical of the value NATO membership brings, while seeing clearly its risks and costs. If you want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get much more serious about fielding an effective military force and clearly commit to helping the US against China in every way possible. And if you don't want America to remain engaged in European security, y'all need to get even more serious about fielding an effective military force. So put your heads down, get to work, and quit it with the hyperbolic butthurt comments about "unexpectedly" being "blown off".

bediger4000 1y ago

What effect does this have on Boeing, one of 3-4 major defense companies. Can the industry handle one more giant meger? Can it handle a vastly impoverished Boeing?

cjrp 1y ago

Presumably the alternative is the SAAB GlobalEye?

Y-bar 1y ago
Seems so, but perhaps some nations like France want a bigger variant with a bit more range and larger sensors. Airbus A330 is already used by European fighters for aerial refuelling so I suppose it could also be built into an AWACS.

mlmonkey 1y ago

> The decision follows US's decision to withdraw from some joint AWACS treaty in July 2024 So... can't really blame Trump.

Etheryte 1y ago
The article doesn't mention Trump anywhere?

drooopy 1y ago

It requires some level of skill and talent to be able to cause this amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. Throughout my 40 years on this planet, Pax Americana was a constant that seemed to hold the world together (+/-). It's scary to see it vanish and with such speed and efficiency.

MengerSponge 1y ago
The world was somewhat sympathetic to the US when we elected Trump the first time: it's disappointing, but you can get tricked sometimes. When we re-elected him it casts the first time as not an error, but rather a deliberate choice. A nation that makes that kind of choice is not a reliable ally. We're just beginning to see the repercussions of that loss of trust.
fransje26 1y ago
> It requires some level of skill and talent to be able to cause this amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. The art of the deal.
tick_tock_tick 1y ago
> amount of damage to the soft power and influence that the US projected around the world in less than a year. Has that happened? Give us something concrete a real example of that. Europe seems to be increasing it's dependency on the USA with large military spendings. They bent the knee really quickly during the last round of trade talks.... If this is a damaged USA's soft power what we've really learned is that we've been wildly overestimating other countries.

petesergeant 1y ago

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qwertox 1y ago

So new tariffs coming in, because it goes against the agreement.

mikewarot 1y ago

I wouldn't put all my eggs on a single billion dollar basket like that in 2025. A networked flock of million dollar drones with phased array radar could be cheaper, more effective, thanks to a larger virtual aperture, and far more survivable an overwatch resource. You could stagger refueling and have it available 24/7.

nine_k 1y ago
Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures? Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm. Will be cool though.
- mikewarot 1y ago
  Atomic clocks are now less than $5000 devices. The same type of circuits that allow GPS receivers to correlate timing to the picosecond could be used in this application. None of what I suggested is fantasy, but it would require good engineering. What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate most stealth coatings and bounce off the airframes of the enemy.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Yes, every separate component is doable. What looks hardest to me is the geometry: every node / drone would not only need to be perfectly synchronized with the rest of the swarm, but also understand its location within it with millimeter precision, in order to time its impulse to do beamforming, or allow locating any received signals. We should assume that near the battlefield GPS is already jammed, so it must be a sophisticated network of laser rangefinders between the drones, plus location data from land stations. Then, there should be a super-node in a larger aircraft that would receive the data from the swarm and turn it into a coherent picture, run object detection and tracking, etc.

nicholasbraker 1y ago

Let's hope a decision on an alternative platform is made quickly (although I am sceptical due to the bureaucratic maze of NATO procurement). The current AWACS-platform (E-3A) still uses old engines which are loud, smokey and not as efficient. Neighbouring communities deserve a quieter platform as well as NATO needs a potent airborne early warning platform. European technology is not an issue (Thales, Leonardo etc. make great modern AESA based radars). Also interoperability of data between NATO members used in the C2 chain is not an issue.

zeristor 1y ago

An interesting angle. Seemingly the USAF was about to buy E-7 Wedgetail aircraft, but according to Wikipedia, they think it would be a better idea to use satellites. This isn’t an angle I had thought of before, and there must be many satellites required to support that. I’ll try and research more into this.