Thread by @olivernmoody

It's that special time of year when the annual inspection report on the shortcomings of the German armed forces comes out.

I read all 171 pages so you don't have to.

So: come with me / and we'll be / in a world of Bundeswehr frustration ...

🧵(1/x)

First, the background: every year the MP tasked with keeping an eye on the Bundeswehr – currently @EvaHoegl – visits German military facilities all over the world and chats to the troops about everything that’s bugging them, from cruddy gym equipment to bullying superiors. (2/x)

In 2022 she spent 100 days travelling around 70 sites and spoke to 2,343 soldiers. Sometimes she fixed things, such as when the Germans on an Iraqi airbase complained they had no BBQ grill & she got them one from Erbil. Mostly, though, she just listened. (3/x)

The big-picture conclusions in the report have already been well documented for months. This is a 🧵 about the smaller details: the everyday shortages, snafus and humiliations that grind down morale and combat-readiness. Buckle up, maggots. (4/x)

Let’s start with gear. Some of the issues are just a bit soul-sapping. But others are life-threatening. Take comms: some soldiers in tanks/IFVs said they have to either open the hatches and shout or *physically get out of the vehicle* to make themselves understood. (5/x)

Or dodgy parachutes. There were 66 parachuting accidents last year, largely because troops still have to use the defective T-10 system, which can’t be steered properly at high speeds or when the wind shifts (IE pretty much any time you are parachuting). (6/x)

It’s taken ten years just to formulate an order for helicopter pilot helmets that the US has been using since the 1990s. Eight years to buy new clothes for paratroopers. Some German paras are having to buy their own head torches and helmet camo. (7/x)

The army’s tank training school has routinely had to cancel lessons because it doesn’t have enough Leopard 2 tanks for pupils to train on. Now they claim to have fixed the problem – by taking tanks away from other parts of the army. (8/x)

There are also widespread shortages of ABC equipment (for atomic/bio/chemical attacks). Eg in seven years the new ABC biology lab in Bavaria has only been able to buy 32 of the 200 devices it needs, even though they’re commercially available. (9/x)

Even basic clothing is a faff. Soldiers have been complaining for years that the standard-issue “Clothing System 90” doesn’t protect against cold, damp or wear on the knees and elbows. New kit has been ordered but won’t be fully rolled out for years. (10/x)

Some soldiers complain they aren’t issued with changes of clothes, or can’t swap them if they’re the wrong size, even on overseas deployments in 🇸🇰🇱🇹🇲🇱. In some cases you apparently need a doctor’s note certifying that the kit is unsuitable for you. (11/x)

This extends to IT. Staff at a naval administration office had to wait *months* to be given a computer. The Bundeswehr’s media department had to wait *seven years* for new audiovisual kit. (12/x)

Some more case studies in just how demoralising the small things can be: 1) the 🇩🇪 contingent at the NATO eFP battlegroup in 🇱🇹 get €500 a year to spend on entertainment. The (significantly smaller) 🇳🇱 force on the same deployment gets €11,000. (13/x)

2) A medic deployed with an NH90 helicopter to 🇲🇱 wasn’t given the radio-equipped helmet he needed to talk to the other troops. Several different offices declined to help him. In the end they had to ask the central procurement office in Koblenz to post one out from 🇩🇪. (14/x)

3) For obvious historical reasons, political education is a big deal in the Bundeswehr. But the paperwork is so laborious that many officers just don’t bother. One said he had to file a formal procurement order just to take his troops on a historical tour of Leipzig. (15/x)

4) A sergeant in Bundeswehr HR had to wait three years for a security check, during which time he was forbidden to access the HR computer system or visit his own office without another member of staff accompanying him everywhere at all times. (16/x)

What about right-wing extremism in the ranks? Well, the total number of suspected cases fell slightly last year. But the case studies are still pretty awful. Among the things soldiers were disciplined for:
-Wearing Z symbols and saying Ukraine should be “denazified” (17/x)

- Displaying the Hitler salute to a non-white soldier and telling him: "N*****s are n*****s, slaves are servants, that's just how it is"

- Showing a colleague a picture of a chimney with the words "the bigger the Jew, the warmer the parlour"
(18/x)

The list could go on and on ... but worth briefly noting the case of an elite KSK special forces officer who stole ammunition, played neo-Nazi death metal and organised a game of football with a pig's head at a barracks party in 2017, and *still* hasn't been disciplined. (19/x)

It also took *ten years* for a court martial to discipline an officer who kept getting drunk and verbally abusing his colleagues, and five years to discipline an NCO for “several propaganda offences with extremist content” such as the words “Sieg Heil”. (20/x)

Cases of hazing/bullying: one officer was leading a lesson on “orders and obedience”. He handed a female soldier a gun and told her to shoot another soldier. She refused, saying she couldn’t tell if it was loaded. (21/x)

… then he gave her a P8 pistol and repeated the same order. Again, she refused. So he pointed the gun at the soldier himself and *pulled the trigger*. (It wasn’t loaded). (22/x)

Then we have the “equator baptism” on a naval ship, where a female sailor was tied up on top of a beer table and had a “mass of raw mincemeat-like material” stuffed into her ears, her nose and her eyes. (23/x)

When she complained afterwards, her superiors decided no disciplinary action was necessary because her compliance with the hazing was “voluntary” and she could have supposedly stopped it any time she wanted. (24/x)

I have to take a break now, but I will come back a bit later and take a look at the state of the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure. Stay tuned. (25/x)

(At the risk of stating the obvious: every military on the planet has problems with bullying, logistics, procurement &c. Not least the UK armed forces. But some of these issues are unusually bad in the Bundeswehr, and uniquely visible.) (26/x)

OK, on to the buildings: @evahoegl warns in the introduction to this section that things like working toilets, clean showers, usable wifi and basic kitchen hygiene are a fundamental question of respect for the soldiers. Why does she feel the need to say that? (27/x)

Let’s begin with the microbiology institute at the Bundeswehr’s medical academy in Munich. It’s housed in a building from 1936. The A/C and heating don’t work. Staff worry that the lab refrigerator will break down at any moment … (28/x)

… which would force them to ship the samples (including biohazards) to a non-military facility. They have to print out their results with a 28-yr-old dot matrix printer whose ribbons must be washed and re-inked by hand. (29/x)

I’m so young I had to look up what a dot-matrix printer was. It’s one of these guys. Basically a robotic typewriter. (30/x)

The Bundeswehr hospital in Ulm has no wifi: not for patients, not for staff, and not for the sensitive medical devices – meaning the manufacturer has to continually send people to monitor them. (31/x)

By contrast, the student accommodation at the Bundeswehr university in Munich *does* have wifi – but the connection is so bad that it only works if you leave your door open or squat in the corridor with your laptop. (32/x)

The barracks used by the Bundeswehr artillery school in Idar-Oberstein hasn’t been renovated since the 1960s. It has drafty windows, water damage from burst pipes and holes in the roof, and unusable bathrooms. (33/x)

The kitchen is run down to the point of being fundamentally unhygienic. The roofs in the technical maintenance halls have been in danger of collapse since 2018. The Bundeswehr has promised it will be fixed … in 2042. (34/x)

Staying with artillery training, the Klotzberg barracks for trainee gunners is physically falling apart to the point where some of the walls have to be propped up with sandbags. (35/x)

This is the Luftwaffe’s officer school in Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria, where it took two years to get a kitchen unit installed and at times there are only two functioning toilets between 30 people. (36/x)

I’ll wrap up the thread here before it becomes unreadably long. But a quick closing thought: is it really a surprise that 21% of new recruits left the Bundeswehr within their first six months last year? (37/x)

Given conditions like these, the demands of the job and the generally underwhelming pay, the surprising thing for me is that nearly 19,000 people a year join up and total numbers remain stable at about 183,000. (38/x)

Even with the big and genuine shift in the German public’s appreciation of the Bundeswehr, and greater public acceptance of the importance of hard power, I find it hard to see how they will hit their target of 203,000 by 2031 without some really fundamental changes. (ENDS)

PS I keep coming back to this tiny detail. The annual entertainment budget for the 🇱🇹 deployment works out at €0.59 per soldier. That's roughly a can of Holsten. Almost worse than nothing (unless you really like cheap pilsner).