Germany’s soldiers of misfortune

In case anyone has missed it, Angela Merkel could not attend the beginning of the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires because her plane, which is operated by the Flugbereitschaft [0] (part of the Luftwaffe) had to make an emergency landing because of serious technical problems [1]. It's a sad state of affairs, and getting increasingly embarrassing.

That being said, you have to be careful. There recently was an insightful article in the FAZ [2] (in German). Basically, a few years ago, the current minister of defense Ursula von der Leyen started to reform a department that may be seen as something between a gentlemen's club of military traditionalists and a lobby organization of the military industrial complex with around 250.000 employees. It swallowed up copious amounts of tax money, and Ursula von der Leyen made herself a lot of enemies among the profiteers of that system by trying to put this to an end. She then made the mistake of attacking Bundeswehr traditions which may be seen as politically incorrect and archaic from the outside, but are important for the troop morale. So, if you like conspiracy theories, you may argue that there are people inside the Bundeswehr who are interested in making the army look worse than it actually is, as long as it undermines von der Leyen's political position.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flugbereitschaft_des_Bundesmin...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/29/angela-merkel-...

[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/ursula-von-der-leyen-gorch-dock-...

> it sounds like an exaggeration to compare Germany’s Bundeswehr to “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” look no further than the army’s standard-issue assault rifle, Heckler & Koch’s G36. The government decided to scrap the weapon after discovering that the gun misses its target if it’s too hot.

Is this actually indicative of a design flaw? All guns' accuracy degrade as the barrel heats up. The metal flexes more and expands, thus throwing off the zero. Weapons like belt fed machine guns mitigate this by having heavy barrels to soak up heat, and quick-change barrels to swap them out with fresh cold ones. Internet searches about the G36's accuracy problems seem rife with fudd-lore. Government studies did not find said accuracy problems: https://m.dw.com/en/heckler-and-koch-vindicated-in-g36-accur...

Other firearms like tank cannons get around this by having barrel sag sensors that adjust the crosshairs to compensate for the effect of the sag.

I get that nit picking the anecdote in the opening statements is kind of pedantic. But it shapes my senses of the author's technical understand (or lack thereof) for the rest of the article.

The awkward reality is that, for nations like Germany (and Italy, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, and...), they have no land borders with unfriendly countries, and no significant overseas possessions that would be worth the effort to make a large navy to protect. Poland, the Baltic states, Turkey, etc. have more reason to be enthusiastic about NATO; western Europe simply does not.

In fact, one could argue that Germany is _safer_ to have a hapless looking military, because it causes France, Poland, etc. to all see them as incapable of being a military threat, and that keeps relations with their neighbors on a friendlier plane. It seems unfair to the U.S., because many of the wealthiest nations of NATO spend the least on their defense, but it is simply a reflection of their actual position.

Not to say that it could never change, but it's not as if the current attitude towards defense spending in Germany is entirely nonrational.

To suggest that Germany or any European country without oversea territories is threatened military by china is ludicrous scare mongering. China has barely any capacity to protect power much further than it's coastal waters.

And there is something similar to be said of Russia. The US wants to maintain a dependency that is being harder to justify.

This sounds similar to the state of affairs in Scandinavia. The part about there being little pride in being a soldier rings especially true. Scandinavians have died in military operations in Afghanistan, but you never hear about it. No one wants to hear about it, because we don't see ourselves as warlike nations. Germany probably has that times 100 due to the legacy of the Nazis.

The US should have pulled out of NATO a long time ago but empires of even that sort are hard to give up. The EU is more than capable of providing for their own security and perhaps having to do it all would make some wavering member states understand that they are truly all in it together.