NATO's 2-percent-of-GDP defense spending pledge has been a political football for years, but the arithmetic underneath it is straightforward: when allied governments actually open their wallets, they are constrained by interoperability. NATO doctrine requires that new platforms talk to existing NATO command, communications, and weapons architecture — architecture that is overwhelmingly American-built. That structural lock-in routes fresh European and Pacific spending back through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales pipeline, and a handful of American primes sit at the receiving end of that pipe.
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