Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimbuna
What I do find a tad ironically humourous is the fact you're a German talking about so-called military weaknesses of the UK when your own country no longer has the means to defend its own borders.
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Absolutely! I am aware of that and did not intend to imply that us wonderful Germans would do it better, in fact we do it even worse. The armed forces are weak and impotent, and new fence ministress claimed she wants to raise the budget to those 2% of GDP as Germany promised in 2014 (Steinmeier, SPD), and immediately she got attacked by the SPD that said that new "weapon craziness" (original quote) would not be the right thing to do. That it is a treaty oblogation that Germany viollates since years and that had been accepted and promsied by a SPD minster back then, nobody mentions anymore.
Well, the players in this episode at Gibraltar and Hormuz are Iran and - Britain, not Germany. It would be better if there were a European alliance to form convoys, but as a matter of fact Britain stands alone currently, and todays annoucnement by Hunt that there will be a European mission, is just his own plan and hope so far - none of the other nations have agreed with him so far.And we do not now if Hunt sitll will be there after tomorrow.
What we nations in the west all suffer form, is age. We are overaging, old, weakening societies. Even with sufficient funding, we would find it increasingly diffiicult to find the young men willing to serve for a bad wage. The few youngster there are know only peace and take it for granted, and the main part of society is old and at an age where it is no longer capable or willing to commit itself to military needs and thinking. The armed forces need to compete with business and industry for the young people there are, and lack of talented trainees has become a potentially neck-breaking problem in Germany (thats the drive behind Germany'S migration policy, but the hope that integration-willing, well-trained experts and specialist workers only would come, has been demystified by now - in the long run migration will cost us more money than we can financially benefit from it to stabilize social security systems. We have a deficitary net effect from it - and now the eocnomy is even cooling and badly trained migrants will be amongst the first getting fired - and then getting wellfare. Merkel messed it up completely.
Old nations and societies tend to stay away from war adventures, it is the young men that becom easily excited about it.The Budneswehr doe snot find enough recruits. The nroxal navy has similiar problems. The US air force is said to run thin on pilots. The demographic problem is the same throughout the West, it seems.
https://de.scribd.com/document/33962...ohn-06-02-2017
^ From 2017, but still in trend and tendency valid.
Practically all the West has a war index below or at 1.00, while the hotspots of violence and aggressive expansion all are multiple factors higher. It also how huge the part of the world is that is in extreme volatility. Quite discouraging.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/gunna...-the-war-index
http://time-price-research-astrofin....ar-gunnar.html