Seriously, thank you for your service to your country and to ours.
I think the general trend in these post-Cold-war days is away from the big iron and toward more mobile, deployable forces. So far so good. But maintaining the Euro-fighter for political purposes is appallingly expensive - critics have made similar statements about maintaining the F-18, F-22, and Joint Strike Fighter programs in the U.S. You can feed a lot of troopers for the cost of one of those machines.
There is, of course, nothing so unremittingly political as the acquisition of new military hardware - that was true even in the old Soviet Union. It's true internally and externally, and is one reason the U.S. Army ended up with a 9mm service pistol (a rather hot topic on FR among us gun nuts). But at some point the troopers' needs have to become paramount or they end up permanently short-changed and the defense contractors end up rich.
I wonder - do you think an all-volunteer German army is feasible at the moment, or have all these years of vigorous anti-military propaganda on campus taken its pool of potential volunteers away?
Since I´m only doing some weekend service and 4-8 weeks per year, I consider myself more a student at the University of Hamburg. ;-)
Btw, I´m one of those guarding AF facilities, the infantry of the Luftwaffe (the only soldiers within the AF, lol).
Sure, there may be reasonable criticism concerning the EF-2000 (Typhoon). Nevertheless, there´s a need to get a fighter jet for CA and AI. I don´t think that the EF-2000 will be used for TASMO, although the Navy will loose its own fighter jets (Tornado).
What´s wrong with pistols? They can be pretty helpful to keep your guys in the battle, lol. Just kidding. Our weapons are ok. I cannot complain about our personal equipment, ok, a GPS for everybody would be great, but .. you know how it is.
The draft is nearly at an end here. The government gets us ready to draft the last recruits in 2010, thus will mean the end of civilian service for hospitals, retirement homes, etc too. I´m not content with that. The current status of volunteers being sent to the foreign missions and making out the largest part of our army and the other part being soldiers of compelling military service for 9 months wasn´t bad at all. The draft makes sure that we have a fast and large Reserve for disasters like floods, or even WMD´s used against our population. Even the permanent protection of critical points like power and water supply stations would be possible with a relative strong Reserve force. And, we don´t know what will be in 10 years. Maybe Russia turns out to get aggressive and hungry for more land, despite the nuclear deterrence.
It´s not that bad to have a sizeable Reserve... it´s also a contribution to our homeland defense, which is a necessity according to our constitution.
My last hope is that a new government will rethink the whole issue. Once that the draft has ended, it´ll be difficult to re-establish it.
Respectfully,
Michael