[Skybird]

Either you need draftees, or you don'T. If you need them, funding is not tzhe problem, for they will see work enough anyway. If you do not need them, additional funding just leads to "Beschäftigungstherapie" (=ergotherapy?) where they do things that are not needed to get done.

It seems to me that the problem has grown from year to year, coinciding with falling service times (from 15 to 12 then 9 and now 6 months) and financial stress for the defence sector. From all feedback I ever got from people who were in the milutary, not that batallion in the arzicle is the exception from the rule, but Schroeder's experience maybe is. How many years is it that you were there? If it is just 4 or 6 years, that already could make a difference again.

And next question to be asked: what military competences could be trained in just 6 months (some even want 4 months now...)? Zeitsoldaten (=professionals) tend to look down on draftees anyway, and not taking them too serious. I know two pros of medium and higher ranks personally since many years now, who both have been to the Afghanistan field, who say that they do not know any professional wanting to go into combat mission, (Heer or Marine) with a troops of draftees serving for 6 months, nor that they would want to do that themselves.

This draft system must go, even more since it is very injust now, because only a small faction of every year's young men get drafted anyway. and for a modern mission-oriented intervention army that the Bundeswehr is de facto being turned into, you do not want and do not need draftees, but professionals with some more training and experience. 6 months, or maybe even 4, simply is a foul compromise doing nothing good for anybody.

Some days ago, a paper got leaked with inernal plannings by the Bundeswehr for the future size of the german forces. The scenario with the smallest number of personell saw cuts in the navy to less than 9000 (all in all!), combat troops not more than 29,000, and a massive reduction from the current overall personell (all weapons branches, combat as well as supply units) level of 250,000 to something below 150,000. Up to 4 billion should be saved that way.

I undersztand and agree that with debt levels as we have them in the West, we cannot act anymore as if we can spend as before and just making more and more debts, if we cannot afford the size of the military we currently have, then we have to accept that. But what they plan in personell reduction now, is too much. Training and technology can compensate for numerical inferiority only to a certain level - and not more. we better cut expensive hightech systems (becasue a highteczh enemy is not in sight for us), but maintain a basic personell level and a sufficient logistic capacity that ensures that combat operations on the ground and via drones can be maintained, becasue our main enemy in the present and forseeable future will be an enemy fighting asymmetric wars with relatively "primitive" weapons that he buys cheap and in masses. the problem of modern hightech armies is that they have become too expensive, needing higher and higher investements to acchieve smaller and smaller amounts of superiority - if not only: compansation . That islamic terror and guerilaly-style enemies force us to make these investements for less and lesser gains in effect is what founds their military, economical, financial success. compared by the ivestements we make and they make, we are loosing all of the latest wars, and we loose them by a huge margin. we need to make the fighting cheaper, and the killing of enemies available on a less-technology-intensive basis. Else we end up with launching one killer satellite per enemy guerilla fighter with a pre-WWII rifle in his hand and an RPG in his rucksack.