dakdouk

It is indeed: many Europeans countries have large, successful defense industries that produce things from spy satellites to handguns, tanks, machine guns, optics and every thing in between. Some of those are inferior to what the Americans make, some of those are on par, some of those are superior as can be seen from the US armed forces choosing European designs. "Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while" is an absurd statement, but perhaps expected from the other side of the Atlantic.

> Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while.

This, I think, is the crux of the issue. When you look at European armed forces, you only see American weapons: M9, M249, M27 IAR, the list goes on.