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Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

The us milirary, independent of the shutdown, should be able to send food from their larger bases in the states to their bases overseas…. Or are they all busy off South America? They’re right, sponging off the host country paints a bad picture.

Or, us food donation agencies should be picked up by air transport etc. People should help out rather than forget the folks over there.

The US not paying their soldiers in Germany is not a case the German social security network is designed to handle, and well it should not have to be. The food banks are charities and not state-run, they're not the primary social security in Germany. But US solders would not formally qualify for any assistance here as far as I'm aware.

The title is misleading. While the US military website published advice for solders to use local food banks they quickly removed the text again. 37000 is the total number of US soldiers in Germany. I don't see a source how many go to food banks.

Here is more information from German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung[0] (use your browsers language translation feature), some excerpts:

> In Germany, however, such images—US soldiers at food banks—are unlikely to be seen. The list of supply tips quickly disappeared from the website. Why food banks were mentioned there in the first place remained unclear at first.

> The more than 30,000 US soldiers in Germany are unlikely to have encountered any major financial problems anyway – according to the IMCOM spokesperson, they received their October salaries as normal despite the shutdown.

> This is in contrast to the approximately 11,000 civilian employees of the US Army in Germany. The US has not released their pay, which is processed by the German “Wage Office for Foreign Armed Forces” in Rhineland-Palatinate. For the time being, the [German] federal government has stepped in and paid the logisticians, cooks, and firefighters their October salaries totaling around 43 million euros, as a spokeswoman for the [German] Federal Ministry of Finance announced on Thursday in response to a query from the SZ.

[0]: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/deutschland-us-army-solda...

US soldiers are not given access to German food banks. The food banks are overcrowded already and you need to prove you require their support to gain access.

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