Probably the main question is how long can Europe defend itself for. This conflict showed us that EU stockpiles of conventional weapons are questionably small for a real conventional war. That's the bit that we needed US for. We utterly failed to provide sufficient ammunition and weapons for Ukraine by ourselves.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 5 points 3 days ago

When the war started pretty much every European military placed some massive orders. So new production mostly did not go to Ukraine. But a lot of weapons are domestic and built in a large quantity. Also not everything from the stockpiles was send to Ukraine. That is just too risky.

So long enough to scale up production and use the EUs large economy.