Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 6th of March 2019 to The Sounding Line.
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As the following chart from Statista shows, troop levels in Germany’s military, the Bundeswehr, have fallen from nearly half a million strong in the late 1980s, to just 179,791 troops in 2018.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Decades of budget cuts since the reunification of East and West Germany have led to dramatic declines in the capability of the Bundeswehr. While some of the reduction is justifiable considering that Germany is no longer the front line of a nuclear cold war, the Bundeswehr has been so deconstructed that it has ceased to be a meaningful contributor to NATO. Recent exposés have reveled that only ten of the German Air-force’s 128 Eurofighter jets are working properly and Germany only has enough missiles to arm four of them. Not a single German submarine is seaworthy and less than half of its small and aging tank fleet are fit or service. Its helicopter fleet is so small than troops have had to borrow civilian helicopters during training. Keep in mind Germany is the second largest economy and population in NATO, after the US.
NATO is a military alliance. With German commitments to modestly increase defense spending already slipping, one has to wonder why Germany is in NATO at all.
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From German perspective it’s perfectly reasonable. USA beaten Germany many times and basically now is still control most of West Europe by NATO. Why they should invest in army, when USA still control them and any move without USA approval will lead to economic sanctions and then to military occupation. See North Stream 2 for example. They don’t have control of their own territory as mostly nobody in this days. Either you will join USA block, China block or Russia block. Sadly, there is no Europe block this days…
In a sense I agree and that may be exactly how Germany sees it. The problem, in my opinion, is that NATO is a mutual defense treaty and involves the obligation to defend other counties in NATO, keep the sea lanes open, etc… By benefiting from that while having no effective military, Germany is basically stealing from the taxpayers in Greece and Poland and the US etc… who spend more than their fair share, in part so their NATO commitments are credible. If Germany is so safe, and so confident that the western global system will hold up all on… Read more »
Well, I get the point. But let’s put the question differently, is it smart move to force Germans to arm themselves? Historically, it never ended well. Basically, whole European Union is build up just to protect continent from war against each other. Look on past events, like Prussia War, Thirty Years’ War, Napoleon, WW1, WW2, it’s very hard to not fight in Europe and Europeans can get pissed very easy. European countries are all connected by land and therefore when one nation is unhappy, whole continent has problem. That`s by the way also reason, why Brits consider themselves different, non-European.… Read more »
Nuclear weapons and the principle of mutually assured destruction kept Europe from WWIII during the cold war, not the EU and not disarmarment