Italy's Defense Ministry has opened a €5.14 billion ($5.86 billion) procurement for a new main battle tank and vehicles built on it, according to a record published Sept. 21 in the database of Italy's National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC). The entry,
That’s my point. We should work as one entity, not necessarily one country, but at least stop wasting resources with everyone doing their own thing. We have SEVENTEEN different types of tanks in Europe.
When it comes to these things we should think of ourselves as EU first, country second, or we won’t make it in the might-makes-right future that the US is trying to shape.
This actually seems like a step closer to that future, doesn’t it? Most of the EU operates some variant of the Leopard, especially as the old Soviet and other Eastern Bloc ones age out and get replaced. This project with Italy is to be a variant of the successor to the Leopard, rather than a totally independent design like Italy’s current tanks. Hungary is doing a variant of this too, and France has signed up to collaborate on a tank with Rheinmetall (although the fighter program that collapsed makes this specific case less promising in my eyes). It seems like a general coalescence around the German designs