Donald Trump Pulling US Troops From Europe in Blow to NATO Allies: Report

[trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works]

It has been high time to get rid of all and any US reliance when that orange fascist Muppet got elected the the first time.

[federalreverse@feddit.org]

Adding /s might have saved your comment from the downvotes.

[prandom_returns@lemm.ee]

Nice suggestion. Let's abandon our strongest ally who are in an identity chrisis for literal terrorists. Thanks, Lemmy.

[meowgenau@programming.dev]

Haha yeah I realized it.

[gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org]

Well i argue that it's more complicated than that ... Europe really did profit tremendously from the relationship after WW2, but now ... not so much anymore, i guess. If one looks at recent developments.

[jagged_circle@feddit.nl]

There's a lot od countries in Europe. Also unclear if you mean Australia

[nocturnalmorning@lemmy.world]

Well, it's an article about trump pulling troops out of Europe, so pretty safe to conclude im from the U.S.

[melchior@feddit.org]

Germany is buying Arrow3, which is anti ICBM.

[jagged_circle@feddit.nl]

Well, Its an article about trump pulling troops out of Europe, so pretty safe to assume by "our country" you mean some country in Europe.

[herrvogel@lemmy.world]

The pilot has to yell "I'M LOVIN' IT" into the radio with sufficient enthusiasm otherwise the landing gear won't come down.

[naiboftabr@infosec.pub]

So having an interceptor is good, definitely the sites in Poland and Romania don't really provide enough coverage. But, the interceptor is only one part of the defense. Before you can use it, you need an early-warning sensor which can spot the flare of a missile launch on the ground (or at sea) - most effectively done with a network of observation satellites. Then that sensor needs to hand off its data to a tracking radar system - preferably one that can track the missile from its boost phase through the atmosphere all the way up into its sub-orbital path. You will probably need several different radar systems at different locations with different angles and ranges to do this effectively (all actively sharing data with each other).

Modern ICBMs are nasty things with multiple warheads and also multiple decoy warheads, and they're constantly dropping off empty fuel tanks and cowlings and other bits of hardware to shed weight during flight, so you need a highly sensitive radar to discriminate among the various debris and identify the real warhead(s). Once you've got that, you can track it for a bit to determine its trajectory and then you can feed that data to an interceptor system to hit it.

Also, explosions aren't worth much in space so your typical interceptor uses a "kinetic warhead" which is basically just a solid chunk of metal (it's a guided, rocket-powered bullet). You have to hit the target directly. If you miss by half a meter, you missed.

All of this identification, tracking, discrimination, targetting and intercepting needs to happen within the very few minutes of the ICBM's flight path, preferably before the warheads separate and spread out. The point being, it's a very difficult thing to actually accomplish and requires a lot of precision, and many different technologies working together in real-time, which is why I say that the MDA's current system couldn't be replaced in less than 20 years.

[maggoty@lemmy.world]

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Anyone who says that is trying to revise history. Bush lied about Saddam having a WMD program to send us to Iraq. It's the perfect example.

[mothmandelorian@lemmy.world]

That will depend on whether Trump knows Putin has something planned for Europe now that his lapdog is in the White House

[redex68@lemmy.world]

Honestly? Sure. The NATO shield will still exist so it doesn't affect the security of European countries much, and it only reduces American military influence abroad by reducing their capabilities to respond to events in the region, so what do we care? We should be investing more in defense regardles of whether the Americans pull out or not.

[valtia@lemmy.world]

Your "strongest ally" just removed 20% of its troops and wants to extort you for the other 80% in its obligations to said alliance

[zink@programming.dev]

I wonder that too. Hiding a kill switch deep within the F-35 is just the kind of shit our government would do. Maybe make the kill switch only able to be activated by something in the F-22, so it won’t ever be relevant unless things go really sideways.

[zink@programming.dev]

As an American, I could get on board for lower military spending, fewer people deployed, and Europe building up their own defense to make up the difference.

But I don’t trust for one second that Trump is doing this for anything good. Maybe Putin thinks Europe will pay less attention to him if they have to make up for lost American defenses.

[tankovayadiviziya@lemmy.world]

I wonder. Maybe Putin and Trump had a backroom deal that if US pulls out of Europe, then Putin will go on the negotiating table to end the war in Ukraine, and Trump is using the argument of "free riding Europeans" as convenient pretext. Trump is showing to Putin that the West is de-escalating by withdrawing American troops. After all, the Russian president is complaining of NATO encroachment. American troop withdrawal is indeed evidence for de-escalation.

Then at the same time, Trump wants to pivot against China. The US troops in Europe could be redeployed to Asia.

This is simply my speculation and there could be more to this than we would know publicly.

[mojofrododojo@lemmy.world]

also a good reason to make such a fuss about greenland:

well if they won't let us protect them, perhaps we should just leave NATO...

smoke mirrors and bullshit, it's all they have

[tankovayadiviziya@lemmy.world]

Trump is not as dumb as people make him out to be (he would not remain a billionaire if he's that dumb), I reckon he's got some sort of plan (or rather a concept of a plan). His wildcard, unpredictable foreign policy harkens back to Gaullism, when Charles De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO, because he is simply annoyed by the Anglos, and France is being France who loves being maverick pursuing its own independent interest. In the end, France pulling out of NATO was a nothingburger, because France has still been a nominal military ally of the West throughout and France eventually returned to NATO. That being said, Trump could be doing something similar and maybe he doesn't even realise it. Trump's current wildcard foreign policy is still driven by nationalist self-interests, which is follows oddly similar pattern to De Gaulle's.