U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker:
I know I’m saying something that politicians do not want to hear, maybe, but we have to stop sort of looking at defense investments as a burden to society.
If we have decided somehow that we have this threat environment for a long, unpredictable time, let’s do the best of that, because it is actually extremely good engineering. It is GDP-creating. It is tech spin-off-creating activity.
And we can actually—because the interface between civilian capabilities and military or defense-industry capability is now becoming less and less obvious—we can do so much more if we decide to say that, okay, this is actually the future.
And I think some countries like Germany have really gone that direction by actually almost replacing automotive capability industry with defense industries.