Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
with respect, the french armed forces are both professional and have a reasonable amount of political spine behind them to achieve political ends via military means.
Indeed. In fact, that was why I intended to showcase them as the cream of the crop in modern day Europe.

My point was essentially that a European military would have the cutbacks of the British, the willingness to fight of the Germans, and the rough size of the French. While the French military is of a very respectable size and capability for a single nation, one would effectively be replacing the militaries of over twenty nations acting in cooperation with a single one that is barely larger and no more effective, and one would be spending billions to do so. An impractical exercise.