#aster-30 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #aster-30, aggregated by home.social.
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European Defense Industrial Base Quandary: De Facto Corruption And Nationalism Not A Good Mix
Abstract: Europe’s defense dilemma is not primarily one of technology but of political organization. While European firms such as MBDA, Thales and their partners have produced advanced systems like SAMP/T and the Meteor missile that rival or surpass many American equivalents, fragmented procurement and inadequate production have left Europe dependent on US military equipment.
European governments continue to prioritize immediate security by purchasing American weapons, reinforcing a cycle that weakens Europe’s own industrial base. National rivalries, budgetary constraints and inconsistent political commitment further undermine collective defense.
The result is a paradox: Europe possesses the expertise to defend itself but lacks the coordinated industrial strategy to do so at scale. That incites Europeans to spend less on defense, as European taxpayer money tends to go to giant US firms.
The solution lies in transparent procurement, pan-European industrial champions, and sustained investment rather than competing national programs. Recent initiatives, including France’s decision to license Aster missile production to Ukraine, suggest that a more integrated European defense policy may finally be emerging.
The future strength of the world democratic alliance, the Empire Of Democracy, depends upon Europe becoming not merely a consumer of security, but one of its principal producers and actors. It is in the interest of the USA, therefore, to understand that one cannot just ask Europe to spend more on defense (as, right now it beefs up the USA), but that one should encourage the European Defense Industrial Base… Even if that means increasing competition against the US DIB, the USA could profit by buying some of these systems (the Meteor, a very long range ram jet missile is an example of a European system without US equivalent).
***.
The French chief of staff (air force general Mandon) anticipates formal war with Russia in the next two years. France and Britain, seconded by other Europeans, have been at war with Russia, informally, for four years. As Putin’s nuclear armageddon’s threats have felt increasingly hollow, Western European military involvement has grown.
Putin’s drift to an ever darker side was, to a great extent, a creation of Western European plutocracy in a mutually reinforcing pact of exploitation. That collaboration was not favorable to the full support of Ukraine, right away.…
Europe, prodded by Putin and waning US enthusiasm, has rearmed… But paradoxically, with US systems, in spite of various US threats.
Denmark, threatened by invasion from the US, dutifully keeps purchasing US systems, for example radar planes…(Although in 2026, it decided to purchase European SAMP/T NG… See below).
***
Ballistic missile defense has been a particularly unfortunate point. The US has been developing the Patriot system for 36 years…
In the last two decades, expanding on French research, the Franco-Italian-British SAMP/T has been developed. It can intercept ballistic missiles, and has done so in Ukraine.. SAMP/T performs as well, or better than Patriot 3. Earlier versions defend the French, Italian and British navies, including aircraft carriers (together those three collaborating navies form the second most powerful navy in the world). The Brits call their variant of SAMP/T “Sea Viper”, the French “MAMBA”. It uses the ASTER (AeroSpatialeTERminal) missiles. SAMP/T constitute the anti-ballistic defense of Britain, France and Italy.
The latest version of SAMP/T, the NG, will be tested in Ukraine in battlefield conditions.
Ignoring the defense industry of other countries has served the USA well, making European defense completely dependent on the USA. Scale and readiness: US systems like Patriot, HIMARS, or F-35 are available in larger quantities and with established logistics chains. European alternatives often exist but are produced in smaller numbers, and scaling up is hard. The excellent French Rafale fighter/strike aircraft has been ordered by the hundreds, by many extra-European countries, but its maker, Dassault, finds it hard to accelerate production. .
France uses very few pieces of US equipment, but most of its systems have been unable to scale up, as the French government is out of money, and other Europeans prefer to entertain their feudal lords across the Atlantic, in the hope of being well considered.
France’s would-be independence from the USA has been viewed as arrogance. Many European leaders have actually attacked the French nuclear industry, putting all sorts of obstacles in its way… Ironically, the French nuclear industry is even more comprehensive than the US systems as France can thoroughly recycle nuclear fuel… Actually the Trump administration has expedited the deployment of a French nuclear company… Bringing needed French nuclear expertise…Granted France’s advanced civilian nuclear fuel cycle, is not, at first sight, a decisive military advantage, but it’s related (long story): Russia, China and France have the most advanced nuclear cycles, and the US is playing catch up… Thanks to France!.
So, in a crucial way, the US is more friendly to the French DIB than France’s own European neighbors (French navy pilots are trained on US carriers, and there is interoperability). This, by the way, has been shown in real military operations, all the way back to the Rwanda civil war, when France interceded, crucially helped by US logistics.
The Europeans, and especially France, have weapons as good or better than their US equivalents, and some of these weapons have played a crucial role in defending Ukraine. However they have rarely reached the scale of US weapons’ procurement, and that has created a vicious circle which Trump has (somewhat disingenuously?) lamented about. Indeed, as it is Europe’s defense procurement makes the US Defense Industrial Base ever more important.
The Europeans are also to blame: instead of engaging in massive production of SAMP/T NG, they have been holding back, as they keep on spending towards their electoral clientele. European governments still behave under peacetime legal and budgetary frameworks, which slows industrial mobilization.
So Italy has only three anti ballistic defense systems on land, France a dozen, and Britain none. Systems sent to Ukraine performed less well than Patriot, then much better after Russian missiles started to maneuver…
***
The CORE QUANDARY:
The real dilemma for Europe, in its most honorable version, is this:
- Short-term: buy American to deter now.
- Long-term: build European capacity to avoid dependency.
Those goals conflict under time pressure and fiscal constraints.
A concrete illustration: Germany’s choice of the European Sky Shield initiative (ESSI) mixes systems—
- Patriot (US),
- Arrow-3 (Israeli/US),
- IRIS-T SLM (German).
This hybrid approach improves immediate defense, supposedly, but fragments the European industrial base further (while reinforcing the US DIB)..ESSI as a German-centric project that favors Berlin’s own defense industry while bypassing established European alternatives like SAMP/T. It sends European taxpayer money to US industrial giants, while ignoring their European equivalents (which are less gigantic but actually better able to ramp up production than the US!). Funneling European taxpayer money to American and Israeli contractors, while starving ultra competent firms like MBDA and Thales… On what grounds? That MBDA and Thales were originally French companies? Or is it also because ESSI will be under the control of Washington and German leaders may feel that they will be rewarded for this astute choice, just like German Chancellor Schroder was amply rewarded by Putin for making the choice of enslaving Germany energetically to the Kremlin? (That European leaders feed at US corporate defense giants’ troughs is amply documented: British ex-PM such as Blair, Cameron and Johnson made fortunes that way…)
Surely the German leaders would not want their motivations to be interpreted as dark, perverse, nationalistic and self-interested?
SAMP/T is a system, battle proven, in development for decades. But Germany decides to ignore it, apparently, some are bound to observe, as if it were 1917 all over again… When united France, Italy and Britain were fighting the Prussian aggressor…
France’s General Delegate for Armaments criticized the German initiative, arguing the favored systems lack the interconnectivity needed for integrated defense. Macron said in 2022 that air defense shouldn’t be reduced to promoting specific national industries at the expense of European autonomy. So the French objection long predates this essay and comes from official channels, not just commentary. Germany pointedly ignored the French objections, demonstrating what some may see as bad faith.
To boot, the argument that purchasing US systems will be faster is false: the US produces only around 600 Patriot 3 a year (and 240 Patriot 2). It takes two years to make a single missile. The truth is simply that German leaders have to think about their employment as consultants for US defense giants, when they retire in at most a few years, and probably, much sooner.
***
Conclusion: Europe does not lack scientific and technological competence; it lacks scale, coordination, sustained political commitment, and a sense of joined destiny.
Corruption, after political retirement, is rampant and left unaddressed (measures have been taken in Britain, but they are ineffective). Until procurement becomes more transparent, centralized and predictable, US defense systems will continue to dominate—not because European alternatives are inferior, but because they are insufficiently produced and integrated…
And Europe is still full of countries which do not quite hate each other, but have unaddressed anger or resentment issues. There is little doubt, for example, that Germany has been increasingly looking at France as an industrial threat… In part from the waning of the industrial domains which Deutschland used to dominate before the likes of China rudely interrupted, while the more advanced sectors which France dominates become ever more important….
European national champions is a bad idea. Pan-European champions is how it should be done.
With the self-destructive mood of Brexit and the anti-nuclear, pro-Putin fifth column holding its deranged rants, still stealthily poisoning the European atmosphere, the stables of despondency have not been disinfected yet.
However, hope springs eternal. On July 14, 2026, while this essay was written, the leaders of Ukraine, Britain, Germany, Spain, the EC, NATO were in Paris watching a beefed up 14th July parade. News was made: France will license Ukraine to build Aster missiles. President Emmanuel Macron announced the license at a joint briefing with Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after the Coalition of the Willing meeting in Paris.
The Empire Of Democracy needs a strong and willful Europe. Europe’s lack of massive official support in the containment of the Iranian nuclear theocracy has been more than a crime, it’s an error, and persisting with it, satanical.
The USA, Europe’s and more specifically France’s child, can’t do it alone, and keep nuclear armed tyrannies at bay while earning contempt from hypocrites.
Europe’s ascendancy was caused by democracy, which fostered innovation, enabling civilization to rise ever higher. It was no accident that the two most democratic nations, Franco-Britiannia dominated the Middle Ages. As the goodness spread, the Empire Of Democracy was established after 1945, with France and Britain rescued by their own progeny, the USA.
It would have been better, of course, if Europe had not versed in near fatal disunity caused by the ascendency of Prussia… Itself in part caused by the expulsion from France of roughly 10% of the population, the Protestsants, by the theocratic tyrant Louis XIV.
A century later, Britain instrumentalized Prussia as a blunt object against the Franco-Austriano-Russian coalition… I mention these apparent details, because they were not details: resentment can cross generations and even centuries, and dirty policies can backfire in the a more vicious way. Brexit was a clear case of unfocused resentment which found the wrong victim (the idea of European unity) and a backfiring consequence (now that the UK is out of Europe it has become a victim rather than the agent it used to be).
Europeans have to learn to become more clever in understanding their own motives and long term consequences…. If it behaves like corruption, looks like corruption, and profitas well as corruption, it is corruption… Europeans can’t just ask Uncle Sam to do all the thinking and emoting and thereafter take moralistic postures about the failings of the American plutocrats they empowered…
Patrice Ayme
Aster 30 accelerating away from a European carrier. Aster 30 has a “PIF PAF” rocket system in the middle of the missile which give perpendicular impulses perpendicular to the missile’s body. This enables Aster to correct its trajectory at 60g, a much higher acceleration than the Patriot 3…. On July 14, 2026, in a joint appearance of the 14 the July parade, Macron and Zelinskyy announced that France would licence Aster 30 New Generation to Ukraine (and make the test program with the cooperation of Putin’s forces…)
#Aster30 #Corruption #Europe #EuropeanDefenseIndustrialBase #Nationalism #NATO #politics #Russia #SAMPTNG #Strategy #Ukraine #USA #war -
European Defense Industrial Base Quandary: De Facto Corruption And Nationalism Not A Good Mix
Abstract: Europe’s defense dilemma is not primarily one of technology but of political organization. While European firms such as MBDA, Thales and their partners have produced advanced systems like SAMP/T and the Meteor missile that rival or surpass many American equivalents, fragmented procurement and inadequate production have left Europe dependent on US military equipment.
European governments continue to prioritize immediate security by purchasing American weapons, reinforcing a cycle that weakens Europe’s own industrial base. National rivalries, budgetary constraints and inconsistent political commitment further undermine collective defense.
The result is a paradox: Europe possesses the expertise to defend itself but lacks the coordinated industrial strategy to do so at scale. That incites Europeans to spend less on defense, as European taxpayer money tends to go to giant US firms.
The solution lies in transparent procurement, pan-European industrial champions, and sustained investment rather than competing national programs. Recent initiatives, including France’s decision to license Aster missile production to Ukraine, suggest that a more integrated European defense policy may finally be emerging.
The future strength of the world democratic alliance, the Empire Of Democracy, depends upon Europe becoming not merely a consumer of security, but one of its principal producers and actors. It is in the interest of the USA, therefore, to understand that one cannot just ask Europe to spend more on defense (as, right now it beefs up the USA), but that one should encourage the European Defense Industrial Base… Even if that means increasing competition against the US DIB, the USA could profit by buying some of these systems (the Meteor, a very long range ram jet missile is an example of a European system without US equivalent).
***.
The French chief of staff (air force general Mandon) anticipates formal war with Russia in the next two years. France and Britain, seconded by other Europeans, have been at war with Russia, informally, for four years. As Putin’s nuclear armageddon’s threats have felt increasingly hollow, Western European military involvement has grown.
Putin’s drift to an ever darker side was, to a great extent, a creation of Western European plutocracy in a mutually reinforcing pact of exploitation. That collaboration was not favorable to the full support of Ukraine, right away.…
Europe, prodded by Putin and waning US enthusiasm, has rearmed… But paradoxically, with US systems, in spite of various US threats.
Denmark, threatened by invasion from the US, dutifully keeps purchasing US systems, for example radar planes…(Although in 2026, it decided to purchase European SAMP/T NG… See below).
***
Ballistic missile defense has been a particularly unfortunate point. The US has been developing the Patriot system for 36 years…
In the last two decades, expanding on French research, the Franco-Italian-British SAMP/T has been developed. It can intercept ballistic missiles, and has done so in Ukraine.. SAMP/T performs as well, or better than Patriot 3. Earlier versions defend the French, Italian and British navies, including aircraft carriers (together those three collaborating navies form the second most powerful navy in the world). The Brits call their variant of SAMP/T “Sea Viper”, the French “MAMBA”. It uses the ASTER (AeroSpatialeTERminal) missiles. SAMP/T constitute the anti-ballistic defense of Britain, France and Italy.
The latest version of SAMP/T, the NG, will be tested in Ukraine in battlefield conditions.
Ignoring the defense industry of other countries has served the USA well, making European defense completely dependent on the USA. Scale and readiness: US systems like Patriot, HIMARS, or F-35 are available in larger quantities and with established logistics chains. European alternatives often exist but are produced in smaller numbers, and scaling up is hard. The excellent French Rafale fighter/strike aircraft has been ordered by the hundreds, by many extra-European countries, but its maker, Dassault, finds it hard to accelerate production. .
France uses very few pieces of US equipment, but most of its systems have been unable to scale up, as the French government is out of money, and other Europeans prefer to entertain their feudal lords across the Atlantic, in the hope of being well considered.
France’s would-be independence from the USA has been viewed as arrogance. Many European leaders have actually attacked the French nuclear industry, putting all sorts of obstacles in its way… Ironically, the French nuclear industry is even more comprehensive than the US systems as France can thoroughly recycle nuclear fuel… Actually the Trump administration has expedited the deployment of a French nuclear company… Bringing needed French nuclear expertise…Granted France’s advanced civilian nuclear fuel cycle, is not, at first sight, a decisive military advantage, but it’s related (long story): Russia, China and France have the most advanced nuclear cycles, and the US is playing catch up… Thanks to France!.
So, in a crucial way, the US is more friendly to the French DIB than France’s own European neighbors (French navy pilots are trained on US carriers, and there is interoperability). This, by the way, has been shown in real military operations, all the way back to the Rwanda civil war, when France interceded, crucially helped by US logistics.
The Europeans, and especially France, have weapons as good or better than their US equivalents, and some of these weapons have played a crucial role in defending Ukraine. However they have rarely reached the scale of US weapons’ procurement, and that has created a vicious circle which Trump has (somewhat disingenuously?) lamented about. Indeed, as it is Europe’s defense procurement makes the US Defense Industrial Base ever more important.
The Europeans are also to blame: instead of engaging in massive production of SAMP/T NG, they have been holding back, as they keep on spending towards their electoral clientele. European governments still behave under peacetime legal and budgetary frameworks, which slows industrial mobilization.
So Italy has only three anti ballistic defense systems on land, France a dozen, and Britain none. Systems sent to Ukraine performed less well than Patriot, then much better after Russian missiles started to maneuver…
***
The CORE QUANDARY:
The real dilemma for Europe, in its most honorable version, is this:
- Short-term: buy American to deter now.
- Long-term: build European capacity to avoid dependency.
Those goals conflict under time pressure and fiscal constraints.
A concrete illustration: Germany’s choice of the European Sky Shield initiative (ESSI) mixes systems—
- Patriot (US),
- Arrow-3 (Israeli/US),
- IRIS-T SLM (German).
This hybrid approach improves immediate defense, supposedly, but fragments the European industrial base further (while reinforcing the US DIB)..ESSI as a German-centric project that favors Berlin’s own defense industry while bypassing established European alternatives like SAMP/T. It sends European taxpayer money to US industrial giants, while ignoring their European equivalents (which are less gigantic but actually better able to ramp up production than the US!). Funneling European taxpayer money to American and Israeli contractors, while starving ultra competent firms like MBDA and Thales… On what grounds? That MBDA and Thales were originally French companies? Or is it also because ESSI will be under the control of Washington and German leaders may feel that they will be rewarded for this astute choice, just like German Chancellor Schroder was amply rewarded by Putin for making the choice of enslaving Germany energetically to the Kremlin? (That European leaders feed at US corporate defense giants’ troughs is amply documented: British ex-PM such as Blair, Cameron and Johnson made fortunes that way…)
Surely the German leaders would not want their motivations to be interpreted as dark, perverse, nationalistic and self-interested?
SAMP/T is a system, battle proven, in development for decades. But Germany decides to ignore it, apparently, some are bound to observe, as if it were 1917 all over again… When united France, Italy and Britain were fighting the Prussian aggressor…
France’s General Delegate for Armaments criticized the German initiative, arguing the favored systems lack the interconnectivity needed for integrated defense. Macron said in 2022 that air defense shouldn’t be reduced to promoting specific national industries at the expense of European autonomy. So the French objection long predates this essay and comes from official channels, not just commentary. Germany pointedly ignored the French objections, demonstrating what some may see as bad faith.
To boot, the argument that purchasing US systems will be faster is false: the US produces only around 600 Patriot 3 a year (and 240 Patriot 2). It takes two years to make a single missile. The truth is simply that German leaders have to think about their employment as consultants for US defense giants, when they retire in at most a few years, and probably, much sooner.
***
Conclusion: Europe does not lack scientific and technological competence; it lacks scale, coordination, sustained political commitment, and a sense of joined destiny.
Corruption, after political retirement, is rampant and left unaddressed (measures have been taken in Britain, but they are ineffective). Until procurement becomes more transparent, centralized and predictable, US defense systems will continue to dominate—not because European alternatives are inferior, but because they are insufficiently produced and integrated…
And Europe is still full of countries which do not quite hate each other, but have unaddressed anger or resentment issues. There is little doubt, for example, that Germany has been increasingly looking at France as an industrial threat… In part from the waning of the industrial domains which Deutschland used to dominate before the likes of China rudely interrupted, while the more advanced sectors which France dominates become ever more important….
European national champions is a bad idea. Pan-European champions is how it should be done.
With the self-destructive mood of Brexit and the anti-nuclear, pro-Putin fifth column holding its deranged rants, still stealthily poisoning the European atmosphere, the stables of despondency have not been disinfected yet.
However, hope springs eternal. On July 14, 2026, while this essay was written, the leaders of Ukraine, Britain, Germany, Spain, the EC, NATO were in Paris watching a beefed up 14th July parade. News was made: France will license Ukraine to build Aster missiles. President Emmanuel Macron announced the license at a joint briefing with Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after the Coalition of the Willing meeting in Paris.
The Empire Of Democracy needs a strong and willful Europe. Europe’s lack of massive official support in the containment of the Iranian nuclear theocracy has been more than a crime, it’s an error, and persisting with it, satanical.
The USA, Europe’s and more specifically France’s child, can’t do it alone, and keep nuclear armed tyrannies at bay while earning contempt from hypocrites.
Europe’s ascendancy was caused by democracy, which fostered innovation, enabling civilization to rise ever higher. It was no accident that the two most democratic nations, Franco-Britiannia dominated the Middle Ages. As the goodness spread, the Empire Of Democracy was established after 1945, with France and Britain rescued by their own progeny, the USA.
It would have been better, of course, if Europe had not versed in near fatal disunity caused by the ascendency of Prussia… Itself in part caused by the expulsion from France of roughly 10% of the population, the Protestsants, by the theocratic tyrant Louis XIV.
A century later, Britain instrumentalized Prussia as a blunt object against the Franco-Austriano-Russian coalition… I mention these apparent details, because they were not details: resentment can cross generations and even centuries, and dirty policies can backfire in the a more vicious way. Brexit was a clear case of unfocused resentment which found the wrong victim (the idea of European unity) and a backfiring consequence (now that the UK is out of Europe it has become a victim rather than the agent it used to be).
Europeans have to learn to become more clever in understanding their own motives and long term consequences…. If it behaves like corruption, looks like corruption, and profitas well as corruption, it is corruption… Europeans can’t just ask Uncle Sam to do all the thinking and emoting and thereafter take moralistic postures about the failings of the American plutocrats they empowered…
Patrice Ayme
Aster 30 accelerating away from a European carrier. Aster 30 has a “PIF PAF” rocket system in the middle of the missile which give perpendicular impulses perpendicular to the missile’s body. This enables Aster to correct its trajectory at 60g, a much higher acceleration than the Patriot 3…. On July 14, 2026, in a joint appearance of the 14 the July parade, Macron and Zelinskyy announced that France would licence Aster 30 New Generation to Ukraine (and make the test program with the cooperation of Putin’s forces…)
#Aster30 #Corruption #Europe #EuropeanDefenseIndustrialBase #Nationalism #NATO #politics #Russia #SAMPTNG #Strategy #Ukraine #USA #war -
@twmcltd.bsky.social
Pres Macron promises French Rafale fighters will fly in Ukraine skies, but it may only be in 2028-2029, said the French Head of State.He also said Ukraine is granted licenses to make Aster-30 anti-ballistic missiles for SAMP/T systems, SCALP cruise missiles + AASM aerial bombs.
7/14/26
https://bsky.app/profile/twmcltd.bsky.social/post/3mqked2in5c2b
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@twmcltd.bsky.social
Pres Macron promises French Rafale fighters will fly in Ukraine skies, but it may only be in 2028-2029, said the French Head of State.He also said Ukraine is granted licenses to make Aster-30 anti-ballistic missiles for SAMP/T systems, SCALP cruise missiles + AASM aerial bombs.
7/14/26
https://bsky.app/profile/twmcltd.bsky.social/post/3mqked2in5c2b
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@wesodonnell.bsky.social
Denmark Skipped Patriot. #Ukraine Is Already Proving Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlunOLasGIw
5/2/2026
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@wesodonnell.bsky.social
Denmark Skipped Patriot. #Ukraine Is Already Proving Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlunOLasGIw
5/2/2026
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@wesodonnell.bsky.social
Denmark Skipped Patriot. #Ukraine Is Already Proving Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlunOLasGIw
5/2/2026
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@wesodonnell.bsky.social
Denmark Skipped Patriot. #Ukraine Is Already Proving Why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlunOLasGIw
5/2/2026