I read the article the day it posted.

My take is that DE is taking entirely reasonable (and 15 years overdue) steps to deploy a formidable deterrence to RU invasion, that doesn't depend almost entirely on the US. Such plans require budgets and milestones, so setting an arbitrary "deadline" by which to achieve a certain level of progress would be routine.

I don't take it to mean that anybody thinks RU will invade or even remotely hopes to in the near term. Do some far-right oligarchs and generals talk trash over too many shots of Beluga? No doubt. But they're barely hanging on with UA, and probably learned their lesson, at least until they do some major restructuring and rebuilding.

You could make the reasonable estimate that absolutely worst case, if RU settles the UA conflict right now that they might be able to restore some measure of combat capacity by 2030, and fix a few of their obvious structural problems. Even then, any modest deterrent should be adequate. NATO/Article 5/USA would be more than enough deterrent, but the Euros are thinking that US backing is no longer an absolute in every potential alternate future reality.


Also, rationally, they cannot win against NATO. UK or FR would nuke them if it looked existential, and DE has options too.

Silver lining to the UA situation...

1. RU got exposed as to how bad they really are. Hard to kid themselves now.
2. RU has had their armor/mech inventory mostly deleted. Gonna do the Fulda gap with prison conscripts in technicals?
3. Euros got a big wakeup call, and will hopefully get serious-ish about their NATO obligations.