Nato members agree 5% of GDP defence target
For more than a decade, it was 2%. Nato's ironclad guarantee to collective defence has been reaffirmed.
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📈 NATO members have yielded to Donald Trump’s demands to ‘pay up’. As EuroNews reports, at the summit this week, all members but for Spain and Slovakia agreed to spend 5 per cent of G.D.P. on defence. NATO chief Mark Rutte also referred to Donald Trump as 'daddy' …
‘NATO leaders on Wednesday confirmed their commitment to more than double defence spending by 2035 banding words like "crucial", "momentous" and "quantum leap", but the summit also exposed rifts over how the US and Europe perceive Ukraine and Russia.
Allies committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on core defence spending to buy military hardware and maintain troops and another 1.5% on defence-related investments. This includes dual-purpose investments that would boost military mobility, cybersecurity, military and civilian cooperation and resilience on critical infrastructure.
US President Donald Trump, who had long called for a 5% target, crowed victory, lauding how "over a trillion (US dollars) a year" will now be spent on defence from Europe and Canada.’
📣 Boosting defence spending is only half the battle for European governments, argues our Director, Harry Readhead, in The Defence Post. Lacking the lobbying clout and profile of the primes, smaller but more innovative companies need to shout louder:
‘Whether or not they agree with Niall Ferguson, that Putin aims to show the worthlessness of Article 5, or with, say, the philosopher John Gray, who thinks Putin is building “a Third Rome” tasked with redeeming the sinful West, Europe’s governments are rearming. Senior ministers say Europe has less than 18 months to be ready for an invasion.
Would that it were as simple as boosting spending. There is something faintly naïve in the suggestion that if only Europe could scrape together enough cash, it could fend off a rival, battle-tested military force. …
For decades, a small number of established contractors able to meet the basic defense needs of peacetime have absorbed the vast bulk of the region’s defense budgets, which have been falling steadily. But in the present circumstances, this will no longer do.
In the absence of working agencies like DARPA, in the UK as elsewhere in Europe, the very companies that we badly need to be doing what they do best – innovating quickly to shore up our defenses – are largely ignored by those at the government level. Money continues to flow to the established contractors, who do not and cannot innovate at the speed we need.’
🚀 Commenting on the break-up-make-up of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Dr. Robert Brüll writes in Space News that it points to something more important: the dangers of relying on private monopolies for vital infrastructure:
‘Governments both in the U.S. and across Europe make themselves vulnerable by leaning too heavily on private monopolies. We’ve seen this in launch services with SpaceX; Starlink with connectivity; Palantir with data and decision systems. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate cloud infrastructure. This is dangerous — not because those companies are bad actors, but because it’s risky to rely too heavily on just a handful of firms to carry out important tasks. …
There are real, practical consequences for these monopolies. For one, space overlaps heavily with defense. In fact, many of the companies serving both sectors, like my own, are dual-use: they have both civilian and military applications. For example, SpaceX has helped launch military payloads, such as the German SARah-2 and SARah-3 radar satellites. If Elon Musk were to decide one day that he no longer wanted to help launch European satellites, then Europe’s dreams of rearmament and strategic autonomy would be at grave risk: I’ve been told by European policymakers that the continent needs to be ready to repel an invasion within 18 months. Continued, free access to space is an essential part of that military readiness.’
🛢️ In 2020, Kayrros predicted the Saudis would crash the oil market and come up stronger as a result. Now, Antoine Halff, Chief Analyst at the world-leading energy and environmental intelligence firm, spoke to Carol Ryan of the Wall Street Journal about why the Kingdom is driving down prices now:
‘The Saudis may have sensed an opportunity to clip the wings of record U.S. crude production and curry favor with the White House at the same time.
Trump wants low prices at the gasoline pump for consumers. Goldman Sachs analyzed the president’s energy-related social-media posts since he joined Twitter in 2009 and found that his preferred oil price, based on benchmark U.S. WTI prices, is between $40 and $50 a barrel. This gives the Saudis and OPEC the green light to push down the oil price.
But pushing oil prices too low is risky. Trump is happy to see energy costs falling, but if they drop into the danger zone for U.S. domestic production, it could trigger a backlash. Keeping things friendly with America could help Saudi get its hands on chips for its investments in artificial intelligence and foreign capital for costly projects such as the futuristic city Neom.’
💰 In Worth, Bogdan Gogulan, Managing Partner of space-focused private equity firm NewSpace Capital, argues that private defence spending is accelerating the development of critical space tech:
‘Increased defence investment is breathing new life into aerospace and deep-tech innovation. Companies that previously struggled to secure commercial funding are now benefiting from sustained government investment, allowing them to work on cutting-edge technologies. These include (among many others) optical communications, necessary for secure and high-speed space-based data transmission; Earth observation, essential for climate monitoring, disaster response, and resource management; and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which enables all-weather, day-and-night imaging capabilities with high precision.
Despite the opportunities that await here, moving from purely commercial to defense markets is not without its hurdles. Startups can face significant challenges. Government contracts often come with delayed payments and lengthy procurement cycles, creating cash flow issues for smaller firms that lack financial reserves. Defense-related technologies are subject to stringent export controls and compliance requirements, heaping bureaucratic burdens on startups that many are ill-equipped to bear.
But for those companies that make the pivot successfully, the rewards far outweigh these obstacles. Defense funding provides long-term stability and a runway for companies to develop world-class technology that may later be commercialized in other sectors. In other words, to pivot into space doesn’t necessarily mean leaving behind the commercial world.’
🙌 And finally, Axiom Space successfully launched four private astronauts to the ISS: