Thursday, March 22, 2018

Good Grief, They Suck

The Germans are screwing up their pledge to provide a single armored brigade for the NATO response force:

Germany has come up short once more in meeting its military obligations to NATO. Leaked readiness data indicates that a key component of the NATO rapid reaction force, which Germany is to supply in 2019, is nowhere near ready to perform duties German said it could handle. The German armored brigade that was promised for 2019 is not able to fulfill its duties. Only about 20 percent of the armored vehicles (Leopard 2 tanks and Marder infantry vehicles) are fit for service. German military aircraft continue to have the lowest readiness rates in NATO and Germany continues, as it has for over twenty year, to promise the situation would be fixed but it never is.

Yet we're supposed to trust Germany to be the NATO framework nation for land combat missions rather than worry that Germany will be the anchor that drags every other NATO army that associates with the Germans down?

Heck, these days I don't know if Germany could design a decent anchor.

What happened to our once capable NATO-era ally that fielded the best mechanized army in NATO? Do the Germans value so little the prosperous democracy they built as part of the free West that they are unwilling to defend it?