Berlin has invested hundreds of billions of euros to rearm since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and aims to play a major role within the North Atlantic Alliance, particularly as the US moves toward isolation.
Berlin has invested hundreds of billions of euros to rearm since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and aims to play a major role within the North Atlantic Alliance, particularly as the US moves toward isolation.
I don’t have first hand knowledge, but I’ve heard they have major bureaucracy and logistics problem.
Is there any news on this front?
Upping their military spending is great, given some certain people a bit further east. Unfortunately if bureaucracy limits things, it might not be so great
German military procurement bureaucracy could be used to win any war. If we could only figure out a way of implementing it in the enemy’s armed forces.
There has never been and will never be any news on that, it’s a state within the state that has defied any attempts at reforming it for decades. On top of that comes corruption, which runs deep in the business. A lot of logistics has been outsourced, maintenance is rarely done in house these days. This might or might not be a result of a certain Ursula von der Leyen, now president of the EU commission, unleashing a bunch of McKinsey consultants (among them a child of hers, did I mention corruption, by the way?) on the armed forces during her tenure as minister of defence.
Spending is always a bad measurement for capability, especially in an environment driven by corruption and nepotism.
… if that’s true … maybe the Germans military procurement should get trained on infiltration and Russian language …
I don’t know about the state of the German army internally, but for sure in European scale, there are bureaucracy that hinders effectiveness. These include countries having different procurement systems, different interest and culture, and each countries have to ask permission first before their own army crosses to another country. Even if Germany and France are more prepared, intra-national bureaucracy makes defense more difficult. The European integrationists wants a more unified army, but as I’ve mentioned, layers upon layers of reasons delay things.
They actually placed some massive orders in recent years. Mostly of the sort of stuff you really need to win wars, but is not fancy enough to make it to front page news like ammunition, communication, intelligence assets and so forth. There are also a lot more orders in the works.
The main issue is that they can not hire enough soldiers.