> Romania is spending a lot of cash on defense measures for drones and other armament
Some of this is going to be stalled - Romania was planning on deploying the Iron Dome [0] and Spyder [1] for AD which was going to be co-produced by Volkswagen in their German factories that were on the chopping block, but Qatar (Volkswagen's largest minority shareholder with 17% voting share) blocked that deal [2].
Iron Dome is designed for protecting from home made rockets made with dung from the Gaza Strip. And according to research the main reason for the low casualty rate is actually the early warning. How exactly is it supposed to help with real missiles and drones?
How do these scams keep happening? Why doesn't anyone care how their taxpayer money is spent?
Exactly. Iron dome was designed for Iranian designed drones and missiles (designed with Chinese help). There is nothing "home made" about palestinian actions, or "the cause", not even the propaganda that it's all homemade. Built by Iran too mostly (again with Chinese help). These are the exact missiles raining down on European cities.
China even built in insurance (check what the fuel is for the more advanced rockets, then check if Iran can actually synthesize that fuel ... heh. Weird)
Oh and to add insult to injury, the big problem with both European and US air defense, being overwhelmed by numbers of drones and rockets, is something Israel has demonstrated how to deal with a dozen times. In fact this system was designed for that.
Therefore Iron dome, Israeli experience and Israeli tactics are exactly what's needed here.
But of course politics are more important than direct demonstrations and weapons fire showing exactly who Europe's enemies are. Sorry that I ever suggested anything remotely different. Apologies. Please continue.
> home made rockets made with dung from the Gaza Strip
Homemade bottle rockets are a 2000s era Israel thing. Now it's Ababeel, Mohajer, Shahed, Arash and other Iranian drones deployed in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. The same kinds of drones being used in Ukraine and operated by Iranian personnel [0][1][2] that are also the same make as the drones shot down in Romania as well as Poland.
Ukraine also gave us intel linking Iranian strike capacity with Russia [3] and Russia has previously offered to stop giving Iran geoint and strike intel in return for the US stopping geoint and strike intel sharing with Ukraine, which the US rejected [4].
For me, I just hope the country collapses and we spend the next ten years prosecuting everyone who caused this outcome and overthrowing the existing system. It’s inevitable with how brain dead leadership is throughout government and corporations. The relentless greedy morons have taken the yoke.
If the country has to survive and recover rather quickly, not collapse, for your prosecution scenario to be likely and effective against any significant share of the people who caused this.
It's kind of a childish view of the world; The expectation is that all the "quality" people will rise up and fix the problems of the country, but my perspective is that the political class is just a reflection of the people, so the existing idiots will just be replaced by new idiots, unless you raise the average somehow.
1. While dragonwriter's point is not entirely wrong, I also wouldn't say I agree either. Czar Nicholas was "prosecuted" quite rapidly after the russian revolution.
2. The problem, ithkuil, is if the population does not see any other way to effectively fix things. (System capture, pareto distributions, disenfranchisement, etc.)
As an aside, I created a new account for this vs. my normal because I've wanted to speak more openly than I can on a work-associated profile for a while now, I will be keeping this account lest anyone thinks it's astroturfing.
I understand the _impulse_ of wanting to destroy the status quo. But it's immature reaction and it's very common in teenagers and young adults.
Most positive progress has been done via hard work, sacrifice and time; most basic rights that we all give for granted now have been achieved that way and not by violence and destructions.
Yes, there are occasional counterexamples when people had to get rid of dictators via violence, but that worked because gradual, grinding, collaborative progress under such rulers was not allowed.
What we're witnessing today is not that: we don't have a strong system that systematically represses people who have a different opinion and discuss new ideas; we have a system where people are increasingly immature and want results fast because their attention span is limited, take huge achievements for granted and are willing to burn everything down because they think it's a game and they have never lived under a civil war
How do these scams keep happening? Why doesn't anyone care how their taxpayer money is spent?