The "Staatsbürger in Uniform" concept is simply not up to realities anymore, if it ever was.
Keep in mind, that in 1955 resistance against rearmament was not limited to leftist/socialist circles. Many conservatives resisted rearmament as well, like Martin Niemöller.
The citizen soldier army and "innere Führung" was some workaround to "sell" rearmament to the populace. Innere Führung was also a sexy name to continue prussian principles like Auftragstaktik (mission based tactics) without mentioning Prussia. "Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen"
Basically, armed forces are a necessary evil because of the threat of communism.
Service was not to be the thing of a professional military caste and the military not a "continuation of politics by other means", but rather a conscious decision to defend freedom and democracy against dictatorship by means of deterrence.
Military decorations were not necessary because the only war that would happen would most likely end Germany, if not the world alltogether.
Under that rationale, the armed forces of germany should have been disbanded after reunification or at least after the last soviet soldier left Germany.
The reason for the existence of the Bundeswehr, as originally envisioned, had disappeared.
This did not happen, yet the political caste clings to this whole belief system.
As you mentioned the constitution, the same thing here. It was called "basic law" to underline the provisional nature of it pending reunification. But after that happened, nobody had the courage to start fresh and so they simply kept the name. But of course de facto the Grundgesetz IS a constitution and never was anything else.
That is what I mean with a "normal" army. An army goes where the politicians decide and if ordered, it fights a war. If someone has a problem with that, he's free not to have anything to do with that.
Simply put, the only way Germany could keep up the old way of thinking would be to drop out of NATO and adopt a Switzerland or Sweden like Neutrality. But if you're in NATO and want to be a big player in the world and even a seat in the security council, you can't be a moral high grounder.
And maybe I'm simply a bit more of a prussia fan than you are, even if I consider myself a leftist, at least regarding social and economic policies.
I can't romanticize about the NVA since I was born in the west, I can only relate what my GDR-born comrades in military service told me and what my east german relatives told me.
Also, it seems to me that many east germans are mercifully free of all those "sins of the past" guilt complexes we Wessis carry around with us.
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