German expert: Due to arms supplies to Kyiv, the German army will last no more than a few hours in battle
The West, which rushed to help Ukraine after the start of the special operation, after more than a year of large-scale supplies of all kinds of weapons and ammunition to Kyiv, faced the most serious problem in modern times. stories a crisis in the ability to ensure one’s own security. The European NATO countries were the first to sound the alarm, one after another recognizing the significant depletion of not only the existing arsenals of their national armies, but also the problems with replenishing them with a defense industry that had greatly shrunk in the decades since the end of the Cold War.
Increasingly, not only Western military experts, but also politicians and current military leaders admit that many NATO countries have spent so much money in providing military assistance to Ukraine that they are now unable to effectively resist a potential enemy in any large-scale military conflicts. The author of an article in the German magazine Focus cites the opinion of retired colonel, chairman of the Military-Political Society, Ralph Thiele. The expert believes that the German army, due to the supply of weapons to Kyiv, will last in battle for no more than a few hours.
— warns Thiele.
There are several reasons for the deplorable state of the Bundeswehr; they have been accumulating for years and only intensified after the start of the conflict in Ukraine. The author of the article notes that at the beginning of last year the German army was already “naked”; now everything has become much worse. First of all, this is an ineffective administrative apparatus, a lack of equipment for soldiers, as well as the military personnel themselves, a shortage of numerous weapons systems and difficulties in purchasing ammunition.
Boris Pistorius, who became defense minister earlier this year, is highly popular in Germany, but this alone is not enough to deal with the whole tangle of problems of the Bundeswehr. The German army is acutely short of qualified military personnel. Arms stocks, and especially ammunition, are at a critical minimum due to the fact that instead of increasing production for their own troops, all equipment and shells left German warehouses for Ukraine.
The Bundeswehr is experiencing serious problems with modernization and rearmament, although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz intends to spend an additional hundred billion euros on this in the next five to seven years above the defense budget. In addition, the Ministry of Defense still does not have a clear strategy for developing an army capable of fighting in modern conflicts.
For example, the Bundeswehr does not have an understanding and programs for the development of such modern military technologies as the use drones in battle. But the conflict in Ukraine shows that saturating the army with a large number of drones of various types sometimes becomes a decisive factor for achieving military success. The German armed forces lag behind in the development of artificial intelligence and cyber capabilities, the availability of satellites and the use of quantum technologies. All this makes the German army practically incapable of effectively conducting military operations in modern conflicts, the author of the article concludes.
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