Oh, they invest in a lot of joint projects.

Everyone loves joint projects in cooperation with the US to develop something again that they could already have bought from that pesky competition of a neighbouring country.

At the moment, Germany and France are cooperating in the development of a future MBT and a future fighter jet without the US.

Most of the US orders Germany placed had no proper European alternative:

• F35 for nuclear sharing with the US. Integrating it into Eurofighter, would have forced the entire blueprints of those to be handed to the US. Hence only 10 are ordered, with more Eurofighters also having been ordered.

• Patriot has SMP/T as a European alternative.

• Arrow3 has no European alternative at all.

• Chinook is a large helicopter, then anything made in Europe. So no clear cut alternative.

• Poseidon P8 nothing in Europe comes close in capability. Germany is part of a group working on one though lead by Airbus.

Those are some large orders, but the rest is mostly European, with maybe some US components. Honestly the German procurment is not especially bad with American components.

MBT both Leopard2 and Leclerc are ITAR free. For fighters Rafael is ITAR free and Eurofighter is pretty close, Austria did have problems with GPS components, but there are alternatives available. Turkey is interessted because Eurofigther is close to that. Only Gripen has a lot of problems.