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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Germany didn't really lag behind to avoid escalation, it's just that the German military was a underfunded mess and the complicated bureaucracy of delivering arms slowed everything down at first.
The German military is actually pretty well funded. It's just that they spend most of those funds on... well, they don't really seem to know themselves.
Nope, before the current government was elected, the Bundeswehr was underfunded to the point where they didn't even fulfill NATO's two percent target. They spent a ton of money on advisors and expensive contracts on top, but that alone was not the reason they were under budget.
Fair, but France spends almost the same amount of euros, but also maintains a nuclear arsenal, and an aircraft carrier and whatever we call colonial forces nowadays. That implies it's not so much a funding issue, but a spending issue.
Of course, you can fix a spending issue by finding it more, and Germany is only around 1.4% of GDP.
The biggest enemy of the Bundeswehr is the BAAINBw, the Bundesamt für Ausrüstung, Informationstechnik und Nutzung der Bundeswehr.
That target was due in 2024 and isn't reached by about half of all member states. Constantly bringing that up will just make you sound like a Trumpist.
No we know it perfectly well: It's spent on gold-plating and avoiding corruption in procurement by having an extremely oversized bureaucratic apparatus. The gold-plating is a matter of taste, as to the bureaucratic overhead, I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn't be cheaper to just out-bribe companies.
With an incompetent defense minister that had absolutely no clue what the fucking hell she was doing.
But yeah, Germany was actually one of the first to commit weaponry to Ukraine after the second day of the start of the major invasion.