I’m not for a moment suggesting we shouldn’t obtain the latest and very best capabilities for our troops wherever we find them. I just wish we had come up with this wonderful new technology ourselves. But, as someone else noted, perhaps better “European made” than “Made in China.”
I’m not insinuating that you mean the troops should go without. I was simply stating the reality that a military that is confronted with real world threats as the US DoD has been does not have the luxury to play games with procurement, personnel strength, doctrine development, etc. If the Germans fly an old F4 Phantom even today and de facto have no viable fighter, are their pilots threatened? When the average German soldier lacks body armor, still wears a steel pot and carries an old G3 rifle well into the 90s, what difference does it make? When their Army essentially has no attack helicopter, so what? When they use radio equipment that is essentially on par with what we used in Vietnam and is so primitive it can’t even communicate anymore with modern digital frequency hopping cipher systems, does this endanger their troops which go no where and do nothing? We are not in that position, and that’s a simple reality.
We do overwhelmingly buy US made. If you open a Jane’s and look at the lists and lists of US manufacturers of any given piece of hardware and then compare that to others you’d notice that from A-Z we are massive in sheer number of vendors, the size of vendors etc. Raytheon alone employs over 80,000 people world wide; that’s one single US defense contractor among hundreds. In near all enabling technologies we are either in the lead or among the leaders. We are as an industrial base competitive in cost and our capacities are immense. Our DoD research is on the cutting edge of development and setting the course. We spend on research ¾’s what the Germans do on defense altogether! However, all that said, others also have good ideas, and when they have a product that offers new capabilities we often pursue them. Furthermore, sometimes we simply run into capacity limits where foreign procurement makes sense. Finally, some of these foreign purchases are part of larger offset deals.