Can the German army still be revived? Scholz: Germany will have the largest conventional army in Europe

During the war, both the East German People's Army and the West German Bundeswehr were among the most elite armed forces in the Warsaw Pact and NATO camps. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the German Bundeswehr, which had lost its defense pressure, was losing its combat power day by day. After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Germany's military pressure seems to have increased, so they began to urgently increase military spending. In this regard, the German government has decided to allocate a special fund of 100 billion euros for the modernization of the Bundeswehr, in 2023 will first pay 8 billion euros. It is reported that this huge sum of 100 billion euros in 16 billion euros will be used for the army, 20 billion euros for the construction of the chain of command, and 40 billion euros for the purchase of the United States F35 fighter jets.

For a long time, it is an indisputable fact that the German Bundeswehr is very crotchety in combat. Trump has repeatedly urged Germany during his time as president of the United States that it should hurry up and raise military spending to a level of more than 2% of GDP, but Merkel has not agreed. However, do not think that Germany's annual military spending is very low, according to the data given by the Swedish Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany's military spending in 2020 reached as much as 52.7 billion U.S. dollars, to know that in the front line of NATO, Poland's military spending was only 13 billion U.S. dollars; and the German government's huge amount of money can only afford a total size of 180,000 people, all aspects of combat readiness level is very poor The Wehrmacht is a very poorly prepared army.

But Chancellor Scholz's speech in May this year still more or less reflects the existence of Germany's military ambitions. The German chancellor pledged at the time that "soon, Germany will have the largest conventional army in Europe." The French media, Le Figaro, believes that the ambitions of the Bundeswehr may upset the Franco-German balance. Perhaps the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the "Tour de France of 1940" still hangs over France. But the Germans themselves had to reluctantly admit the reality that the Bundeswehr lacked basically everything, their communication systems were not even compatible with the rest of NATO, and the German army was far from being able to surpass the French or the British.

Then the question arises, is the French worry necessary? At least in the short term is not necessary at all. The German government has been using $52.7 billion to raise a large number of "armed civil servants" who have no fighting ability, and if the Bundeswehr wants to completely change the current crotch situation, it will have to do it from the ground up. The German army is under enormous pressure to recruit.

In 2017, during a NATO military exercise, 400 German soldiers protested for overtime pay for working more than 8 hours a day, and some even threatened to resign.

In addition, the performance of the troops in Afghanistan in previous years is also an indication of the current combat effectiveness of the German army. For example, in 2007, the average German soldier deployed in Afghanistan consumed 229 liters of beer and 25 bottles of wine per person, and the obesity rate soared to over 40 percent. Even now, the average obesity rate of the German army has even exceeded the average obesity rate of the German nationals.

In addition, although Germany's military industry is relatively developed, they can produce such advanced weapons as PZH2000 self-propelled guns, and Leopard 2 main battle tanks, but in the German military such equipment is not optimistic about the combat readiness rate. 2018 German Defense Ministry submitted a report on the operational readiness of major weapons systems, the German army's Tiger helicopters failure rate of 83%, Leopard 2 main battle tanks failure rate of up to 53%, 128 Typhoon fighter jets 53 percent, less than 40 of the 128 Typhoon fighter jets can fly normally, and only five of the Navy's 13 frigates can be deployed. More than 50 billion dollars a year to raise this group of "federal fat chicken", I think the allocation of 100 billion euros in additional military spending will not bring much improvement to the German army.