Re: European Military Not Up To Par?

[Arclight <arclight@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:50 04.02.2002 -0800, Jeff Pawlowski wrote:

>http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/02/03/munich.defence/index.html
>
>What do our European list members think about this?

Well - seems to me it's about two things:

- being able to do something

and

- wanting to do something

About "being able to do something"

It's obvious that the US has the most advanced and most powerful military 
machinery today. That's not surprising, because that somewhat their mission 
statement, AFAIK. So the real worry, as it seems to me, is "our allies are 
not powerful enough to do certain things that we would like to see them 
doing". Please note that this is not meant in a negative way.
Before the fall of the iron curtain, all armies were tailored towards 
full-fledged war, e.g. fighting a symetric battle. Besides some SF 
capabilities, armies were huge, heavy, and somewhat slow. But as you all 
know, as long as you are as fast as your enemy, that's a worrying thought, 
but no real problem. Especially as both sides don't really want to fight it 
our themselves. With the fall of the iron curtain, this has changed. And 
also, with the loss of one of the superpowers, the situation has changed. 
Conflicts which were, let's call it this way, subdued, broke out again. And 
terrorists came on the agenda. This, because they too broke loose. The 
problem is, that all armies now had to and have to change their profile. 
 From a full-fledged army to an intervention army. But this process will 
cost a lot of money and it will cost time.
I'll now leave the broader perspective on this, and will describe what IMO 
the specific problems within germany are. At first, the problem described 
above simply did not apply to germany. Because by our constitution, which 
we really only have since the fall of the iron curtain and german 
reunification, be were simply not allowed to take military actions outside 
our own border or outside the NATO agreement. So we "only" had to undertake 
a massive downsizing and restructuring of our armed forces. Then, we 
changed our constitution, asked by NATO, and started to restructure our 
forces again. This time, we divided it into a small intervention force 
("crisis reaction forces") and a bigger home defence force. During this 
time we started to take part in SFOR, KFOR, and so on. Now, as we see that 
our military structure is not tailored towards the massive engagements 
germany takes part in, our armed forces will be restructured again. AFAIK, 
the number of german armed forces in foreign territories now is at about 
12.000, that's rougly 5% of our total force. And this happens, while we 
still have to replace a large part of our equipment, airplanes and 
vehicles. So to solve the problem of "not being able to do something" in 
regards to germany is a lack of time and funding. And all I can say is that 
it's damn hard to justify this in front of the public, because it's a) not 
popular b) we currently have a lot of problems we could spend our money on 
c) we simply lack money ATM. Our goverment is simply not in the same 
situation as GW Bush, because we need to repay credits now. He's pretty 
lucky that Bill Clinton did this for him ;)

About "wanting to do something"

When 9-11 happened, everyone was shocked, and everyone (ok, not everyone, 
but all those who had some sort of responsibility) knew something had to be 
done. But it simply has to be reasonable. And that's certainly not invading 
iraq, as has been hinted at in Munich in the last days.
Hunting terrorist organizations when there's proof they have planned or are 
planning actions and therefore pose a threat, is one thing, but invading a 
country, and this means declaring war, is something completely different. 
Besides this, nobody knows what to do after getting Saddam Hussein. And 
some people here are afraid that really nobody knows, which includes the US 
goverment. And even if our goverment would agree on such action - a big 
part of the people here won't. Which leads us to the elections at the end 
of the year...

Of course, YMMV.

Phew, lot of text...

Arclight