Image source: topwar.ru
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 Kiev, faced the most serious crisis in modern history of its own security capabilities. The European NATO countries were the first to sound the alarm, one after another recognizing the significant impoverishment not only of the existing arsenals of national armies, but also the problems with their replenishment by the defense industry, which had shrunk greatly in the decades after the end of the cold War.
Increasingly, not only Western military experts, but also politicians and acting military leaders recognize that many NATO countries have so exhausted themselves in the course of providing military assistance to Ukraine that they are now unable to effectively confront 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 Kiev, will last no more than a few hours in battle.
Thiele warns.
There are several reasons for such a deplorable state of the Bundeswehr, they have been accumulating for years and only intensified after the outbreak 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 inefficient administrative apparatus, a lack of equipment for soldiers, as well as for the military 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 sort out the whole tangle of Bundeswehr problems. The German army is sorely lacking qualified military personnel. Stocks of weapons, 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 in Ukraine.
The Bundeswehr is experiencing serious problems with modernization and rearmament, although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz intends to spend an additional one hundred billion euros over the defense budget in the next five to seven years. In addition, the Ministry of Defense still lacks a clear strategy for the development of 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 of drones in combat. 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 combat success. The German armed forces are lagging 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 unable to effectively conduct military operations in modern conflicts, the author concludes.
