NATO has been a paper tiger for decades
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laughing all the way to Vilnius
Germany’s top general: “Our army is standing bare”
Germany’s highest-ranking military officer cast doubt on the Germany army's combat readiness, claiming that years of neglect have left it in a questionable state amid the ongoing Ukrainian-Russian war.
Inspector of the Army Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais described the army as "standing bare" and said it would be limited in its capabilities should it be asked to assist in a NATO mission in a post he shared on his LinkedIn profile, Stripes.com reported.
In my 41st year of service in peace, I would not have thought I would have had to experience another war," he added in the post. "And the army that I am allowed to lead, is more or less standing bare."
After Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this week, the international community has been put on notice and German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht placed the country’s defense forces on national alert.
But Mais claimed in the post that the army would be limited in its capabilities to assist in a NATO mission: "The options we can offer policymakers to support the Alliance are extremely limited."
According to the report, Mais appealed to his government to do more to boost its combat readiness in 2014, following the Russian invasion of Crimea, but his arguments failed to influence policy changes.
"We all saw it coming and were unable to penetrate with our arguments to draw and implement the conclusions of the annexation of Crimea," he wrote in the post.
Putin was aware of this, of course, but you know who else was? Trump. And for his efforts, he was ridiculed and denounced by Democrats and Republican GOP types here, who thought he was embarrassing them before the sophisticated friends in Europe. The Europeans themselves, of course, hated him for pointing out their danger.
Though not everyone disagreed, even the left-wing Economist:
Why Germany’s army is in a bad state
A false sense of geopolitical security has left the Bundeswehr poorly equipped
DONALD TRUMP says it is “not fair” for Europe’s largest economy to spend proportionally so much less on defence than America does. Germany spends just 1.2% of its GDP on defence, and it shows. A report released in February showed that less than half the country’s Leopard tanks, 12 out of 50 Tiger helicopters and only 39 of its 128 Typhoon fighter aircraft were fit for action. At the end of last year, none of the country’s six submarines was at sea. In short: Germany’s armed forces are barely fit for purpose. Why?
Throughout the cold war West Germany was NATO’s eastern border state, the first line of defence against the Eastern Bloc. Though pacifist in culture following the traumas of the second world war, it invested heavily in territorial defence. By 1990 it had more than 5,000 battle tanks, some 500,000 personnel and was spending almost 3% of GDP on defence. Then the Berlin Wall fell and the reunified Germany suddenly felt insulated. Military investment plunged, and the Bundeswehr was reshaped into a force capable of only limited expeditionary deployments. In 2011 Angela Merkel’s government ended conscription, hoping to replace a large standing army with a small, surgical one (today it numbers little more than 180,000). Then came the fateful year of 2014. Russia intervened in Ukraine, annexing Crimea. Germany committed forces to expeditionary missions in Iraq and Mali. It pledged at a NATO summit in Wales to spend 2% of its GDP on defence by 2024. Its sense of geopolitical stability was suddenly challenged; Ursula von der Leyen (pictured), the recently appointed defence minister, realised that the Bundeswehr was hopelessly under-prepared and started trying to overhaul it.
Mrs von der Leyen gets much of the blame for the slow progress—mostly unfairly. The defence minister has battled against all sorts of inertia in her bid to modernise the Bundeswehr. One is the German public’s resistance to defence spending: last year’s election campaign saw even the moderate-left Social Democrats characterise the pursuit of the 2% target as a dismal capitulation to Mr Trump. That Mrs Merkel recently affirmed that Germany would be spending 1.5% of GDP on defence by 2024, and would hit the 2% target around 2030, marks an achievement for Mrs von der Leyen and a challenge to public opinion (merely 15% of voters approve of the increase, according to one recent poll). Then there is the culture of the armed forces. … Finally there are personnel shortages: the Bundeswehr lacks trained troops to bear some of the new arms it is buying. Plans to increase the manpower to 200,000 will be hard to implement because, in such an anti-militarist country, careers in the armed forces remain unpopular.
meow
