Prior to taking up the post as German chancellor, Freidrich Merz criticized US President Donald Trump’s “America first” doctrine and said he is prepared for the “worst case scenario,” hinting at a future where Washington would no longer be seen as a trusted ally. But Papperger pushed back on political signaling from Merz for Germany to establish “independence” from the US. “Chancellor Merz now will invest the money, and the whole government will invest the money,” added Papperger, on Berlin’s plans to increase defense spending. “So I think that Germany, but also Europe … will grow up to be a reliable partner of the United States.”

Trump’s pressure on Europe to do more for its own security has since led to most NATO allies agreeing to a 3.5 percent GDP defense spending pledge and an additional 1.5 percent GDP on related items like infrastructure. The German government is investing “more than the rest of Europe” and years of underspending in the country’s armed forces before the war in Ukraine has been “fixed” under a Ministry of Finance plan to reach a military budget of €160 billion in 2029, said Papperger. Rheinmetall holds robust industrial ties with US giant Lockheed Martin and strengthened cooperation further this week at DSEI by unveiling a next-generation “missile tank destroyer” technology demonstrator. The land system comprises a 6×6 Fuchs armored vehicle and Hellfire Longbow and Joint Air to Ground Munition (JAGM) missiles. The latest move to join forces builds on partnerships across several other high profile weapon system programs including F-35 fifth-generation fighter jets and the Global Mobile Artillery Rocket System (GMARS) capability.

“We make a Europeanisation of that stuff,” said Papperger. “It’s not that we buy American technology, it’s that we implement American technology into Europe.” Relying on European solutions alone would be counterproductive, he suggested. “If you want to make a R and D [Research and Design] program in Europe to build up everything … you are not [going to be] ready in 10 years,” he said. A total of three F-35A fuselages, being built by Rheinmetall for non US-customers, have so far been produced by the firm at a new production facility in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. A “grand opening” of the site is scheduled in four to six weeks, Papperger explained. In 2023, Rheinmetall stated that “at least” 400 of the fuselages will be manufactured in all.

“Europeanisation” is when you locally manufacture one part, import everything else (including the engine and the delicate electronics which actually make the plane what it is), and then pat yourself on the back for the might of your domestic industry. This is like that deal for Egyptian M1 Abrams production, where in the end they ended up only being able to make like a fifth of the parts and mostly just assembling tank kits imported from the US.

A cancellation notice, published by Madrid’s procurement agency last week, does not provide an explanation for the move, but it sits in line with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to accelerate approval of a Royal Decree Law, consolidating an existing arms embargo against Jerusalem. The move is one of nine actions the Spanish government said it plans to take to help “stop the genocide in Gaza, pursue its perpetrators, and support the Palestinian population.” Once adopted, the Decree will establish “a legal and permanent ban on the purchase and sale of weapons, ammunition, and military equipment” to Israel, Spain’s central government announced last week. The AFP previously reported the cancelation of the SILAM deal.

The Spanish Ministry of Defense referred Breaking Defense to “recent comments” on the matter and other cancelled weapon buys of Israeli origin from Spanish Minister of Defense Margarita Robles. “We have made it very clear that this technological material, which was being supplied to Spain by Israeli companies, will be replaced by Spanish industry,” she said. “Additional measures” announced last week by Madrid in response to the Gaza conflict include a ban on any aircraft transiting Spanish airspace to transport defense equipment to Israel. Similarly, ships carrying fuel to the Israeli armed forces are prohibited from entering Spanish ports.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, in response, accused Sánchez of antisemitism and barred two senior Spanish officials from entering Israel.

The SILAM contract was originally awarded in 2023 to a joint venture between Spanish companies Escribano Mechanical & Engineering and Rheinmetall Expal Munitions, a subsidiary of the German giant. According to the Spanish Ministry of Defense (MoD), Expal, Escribano and Spanish technology firm GMV, displayed the SILAM solution at the FEINDEF trade show in 2023, alongside Elbit, prior to contract award. The weapon system was put forward for acquisition in order to address an “absence of artillery capability that arose a decade ago when the [Spanish Army’s] Teruel system was decommissioned,” noted the MoD at the time [PDF]. Elbit Systems company literature states that PULS “can fire a variety of ammunition types to various ranges from the same position, to ranges of up to 300km.” The system can fire munitions including Accular and Predator Hawk rockets. PULS European customers include Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. Earlier this year, Madrid cancelled a €285 million contract for the purchase of 168 launch units and 1,680 Spike LR2 anti-tank missiles produced by Israel’s Rafael. Elbit and Rafael did not immediately respond to a request for comment at the time of publication. A United Nations independent commission announced today that it has found that Israel “is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza” — an accusation Jerusalem has vehemently denied as it carries out military operations in Gaza that it says target Hamas fighters.

“With Fuze, the Army is telling innovators that we’re open for business. Fuze will help us to not only invest but scale promising capabilities — bridging the valley of death,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a statement to Defense News. Unlike traditional procurement that starts with an Army-defined problem followed by appointing a company to solve the problem, Fuze flips the approach. The new process allows the service to find technology to bring in “that helps us think about what our problems are differently,” Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, told Defense News in a recent interview. Venture capitalists make 100 investments and only end up with a few with outsized returns. The Army is accepting that same risk to capture bigger payoffs. “We’re really taking the approach where we’re going to deliberately make a large number of investments in emerging tech companies,” Matt Willis, the Army’s Fuze program director, said in the interview. “Some tech might not reach the maturity that we want, [but] there’s going to be some companies that are going to have an outsized, revolutionary impact on our soldiers.”

Y’know, there’s this amazing thing called a planned economy, where you can just, like, put in the economic plan “we’ll provide X money/resources to this and that R&D program”, with the same expectation that not all of this research will actually produce something directly usable, and you don’t even need to pad tech CEO’s wallets for that, you can just have guys directly working for the government doing all that! Many valuable pieces of technology were developed under this model!

The program aligns four existing fundings streams: XTech prize competitions, small-business funding, tech maturation and manufacturing technology — worth about $750 million in fiscal 2025. The Army plans to initiate the program by running an XTech Disrupt live pitch competition, in partnership with Y Combinator — a technology startup accelerator and VC firm — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference next month in Washington.

the… hackernews guys?

The competition, according to Willis, will focus on four technology areas important to the Army: electronic warfare, unmanned aircraft systems, counter-UAS and energy resiliency at the edge. The prize pool totals $500,000. Technologies that win out in the competition will go straight into the hands of soldiers in operational environments for real-world evaluation. The Army has spent the better part of a decade trying to match its acquisition speed with the rest of the high-tech world, but trying to break down the bureaucracy and change the culture has been a challenging task. Fuze is central to a broader shift in the Army as it seeks dramatic transformation rapidly. “Continuous transformation is like our once-in-a-generation change for the Army to get at and prepare for the future battlefield,” Brandon Pugh, the Army’s cyber adviser, told Defense News. “But a key part of that is the acquisition process to really make sure that the warfighter and the soldier on the battlefield has the correct technology they need.”

And surely tech-bro dipshits will be able to deliver that. Logistics? Oh, we have an app for that, just pick the ammunition you need from the menu (and don’t forget to tip your BattleDash driver!). This whole program is even named like an app!

Speed is central to that transformation. “We’re hoping to have a capability to an acquisition pathway in 10 days, and hopefully within 30 to 45 days, for the first prototype to be with an Army unit,” Pugh said. “That is extraordinary.” The Army has struggled with the pace of past acquisitions, particularly in fast-evolving fields like electronic warfare. “It’s so quickly evolving, you have to be able to acquire this quickly and iterate quickly, or else you’re instantly behind, even if you do successfully acquire it. I think that’s the risk,” Pugh noted. Army officials stressed that Fuze is not just a bureaucratic reshuffling. “This isn’t just like a rebranding. We’re coalescing these innovation programs from a strategic, operational and execution standpoint… to help companies move through that pipeline more quickly,” Willis said. “The end outcome we want is having the best technology here quickly,” Pugh said.

Hmm, I wonder if maybe there’s a reason that technology which people’s lives depend on has a somewhat slower development process than, like, a fucking app. Now, there obviously is plenty of graft in US military procurement, but throwing stacks of cash at random tech companies doesn’t exactly solve that problem.