“This war has nothing to do with NATO. It’s not NATO’s war,” Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory,” he added.
lol is that true? are you german?
It is a bit of a meme in germany that our military equipment suffers from a lack of maintenance. Also there were a bunch of cases of new weapons systems just failing catastrophically or having huge security issues.
While true, Germany also has quite strict rules on rating equipment to not be ready. A broken heating or turning indicator on an IFV means it counts as non operational.
For ships there’s a rule of thumb. One is operational and on a mission, one is being refueled and restocked, one is being refit, maintained, or upgraded. So you need three units to always have one available. Germany has six submarines, meaning two are always available for active operations.
For planes you have to do hours of maintenance for every minute in the air.
The Bundeswehr used to lack funds and personnel, now it lacks mostly qualified personnel.
The amount of funds was never the problem. The way it was spend is and was the main problem.
My country is a bit towards the south and nobody really knows how our ships still manage to float.
We have ships where the entire navigation suite has been replaced with a commercial GPS.
The guns are fired… Every now and then. Sparingly. We still have ammunition from the 70’s in stock. Some times we even manage to misplace equipment.
Yet somehow we’re considered as the reliable ally, although a bit… wierd.
Honestly, that’ll do just fine in 90% of cases.
Only issues are:
What do you do if some country has maliciously turned off or disabled the GPS satellites?
The commercial GPS unit probably isn’t very EMP-resistant, so it might quickly be disabled if EMPs start going off all over the place … as would happen in a nuclear war.
But as long as you’re not fighting anybody capable of turning the entire GPS system off and the war hasn’t gone nuclear, it should probably be fine.
Sincerely? I’d expect to see astrolabes or sextants being pulled from storage.
Most naval ships actually do carry these old school navigation devices (as well as paper charts) and train on how to use them, just for this purpose. Just in case something disables the electronic navigation.
That is nice to know
“Bedingt abwehrfähig” is the bureacratic term the government uses to explain that the German military, in particular the equipment, is broken beyond any hope of repair.
Germany sold some submarines to Greece that were leaning over on one side out the factory
BMW makes submarines?
So Canada is buying the Korean ones then?