I'm John Batsch with Bill Rojold, the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, and his colleague

John Hardy of FD. Gentlemen, the NATO meeting at the Hague over these last days has turned

into a demonstration of how much you can spend on NATO defense over these next years.

I mentioned that the agreed upon number is no longer 2%,

but 3.5% of weaponry and personnel.

An additional 1.5% is mentioned for cyber and infrastructure

that would be part of a defense perimeter.

3.5% or 5 percent of what, the GDP of the European Union.

The projected rate right now suggests that the 2025 GDP will be $20 trillion.

Anybody want to guess that that's a lot of money?

In addition to that,

3.5% of it is a great deal of money to spend suddenly

on coming up with personnel.

So Mr. Hardy, given those numbers that are all agreed upon, I believe there's one waiver that's still being debated about Spain.

The expectation is that the Europeans have the capability of creating an impressive and vast force of sophisticated weaponry,

combined with the remarks by President McCrone and Chancellor Merritt

in an op-ed in the Financial Times last week, and remarks by not member of the EU but member of

NATO, Great Britain, led by Kirstearner, the Labor Prime Minister, who says very clearly that he's going to take from

Peter to pay Paul. And that's a politically risky issue for him because he represents the labor

party that is seen as keen on social democracy, not on military democracy. But in any event, it's a very large number.

It has to be impressive.

Is it for Keefe?

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