[Skybird]

Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to equip the Bundeswehr for its core mission with 100 billion euros. The defense report shows that the money is sorely needed. Nevertheless, Germany will remain a very vulnerable country over the next five to ten years. This has to do above all with the "Putin basic mistake" made by Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel.

"Bundeswehr" it is when mountain infantry waits for skis. Or combat swimmers don't have a swimming pool. Or infantrymen hope for combat helmets, making it clear that it was really an achievement to deliver 5000 helmets to Ukraine - after all, the German army itself has none.

One can indeed get the idea of buying a new helicopter when the old one has been already flying for over 50 years, or more precisely, less than every second in the fleet that most of the time is grounded. In any case, you can thank Willy Brandt for buying them. For those who are younger than 50:

Willy Brandt was once German chancellor. The SPD man, who in his old age became an icon of the peace movement, made sure, before this could happen, that Germany spent three and a half percent of its budget on national defense.

Today, Brandt's successor, Olaf Scholz, can already celebrate himself for a "turn of the times" when he promises to spend a good half of it in the future. Times were different back then. The Cold War was raging, and Willy Brandt knew where the enemy stood and how powerful he was. For Brandt was a convinced anti-communist.

The anti-communists in the SPD - even Brandt's successor Helmut Schmidt still invested more than three percent of the gross national product in the military - were followed by those who "understood" and appeased Russia. First in the SPD, then also in the CDU/CSU.

This was the basic mistake of the two German chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel: They believed in the goodness of the Russian leader Putin. And considered the defense of Germany more or less superfluous. Which is why today the defense report presented by Social Democrat Eva Högl is either a case for satire or, because of Vladimir Putin, a veritable horror story.

Not even everything was ready for German soldiers on combat missions. In Mali, they lacked the right vests and had to be sent on. Nor were the right backpacks always available, a fatal matter when you have to parachute into unpleasant parts of the world as a "fighter".

The additional 100 billion for the Bundeswehr announced by the chancellor is called a "huge opportunity" by the defense commissioner, party colleague Högl. However, it will be many years before the Bundeswehr can be repaired.

Equipment is a long-term business. In other words, over the next five to (more likely) ten years, Germany will remain a very vulnerable country, 100 billion or not.

After Germany's highest-ranking army soldier, Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, admitted that the Bundeswehr was "bare," Högl now says placatingly that the troops are "ready for action." But is "ready for action" also "ready for defense"?


In view of the obvious equipment deficiencies of the Bundeswehr, military historian Jürg Neitzel asks what has actually happened to the billions that the Bundeswehr has been allowed to spend since Putin's Crimean campaign. After all, this amounts to up to 18 billion euros annually.

One learns that defense does not depend on money alone. A lot can go wrong when buying tanks and aircraft, even more so than when trying to get a major airport up and running in Berlin. "The whole system of procurement is too ponderous," Högl says. That sounds as bad as it is meant to be.

So if there is now this paradigm shift forced by Putin via war of aggression and security becomes the first of all values again, then Olaf Scholz's most important department head in the coming years will be the federal defense minister.

Before the chancellor made her the head of the armed forces, she had never set foot in a barracks. And had already planned her political retirement anyway. Now there is a new job description for her:

She is demanded to be a passionate top manager who can train the entire Bundeswehr to get rid of the sluggishness it has accumulated during the treacherous peacetime. As a mental coach, she will find the right language to use against unscrupulous threats to democracy in this country.

The search is also on for someone to save the now suddenly very large budget from being plundered by industry, its lobby and/or compliant members of the Bundestag who still owe a favor to the arms manufacturers in their constituencies.

For it must be stated: If it is true that the Bundeswehr is only conditionally ready for defense, what has it done with the 50 billion it currently has at its disposal? Which is, after all, the world's seventh-largest defense budget - remarkable for a country that has seen itself as a "peace nation."

But perhaps that is the biggest problem: The "peace nation" has just ended. And yesterday's supposedly important issues have become today's luxury problems. It only seems strange at the moment that the Bundeswehr has spent its energy trying to genderize the "one-man package" into a "one-person package.

In any case, Germany needs a new "mindset," which is likely to be more strenuous than raising a lot of money for the Bundeswehr. In an interview with Der Spiegel, the Israeli world thinker Noah Yuval Harari put it this way:

"You cannot force someone to make peace, but that someone can force us to make war."

What that means must also first be understood. Not only in the Bundeswehr.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


"Here You see our new best-equipped Bundeswehr. Stealth bombers, stealth grenade launchers,
stealth tanks, stealth soldieresses(f) and stealth soldiers(m)"