[Skybird]

https://www.nzz.ch/deutschland/der-f...&_x_tr_sl=auto

The Bundeswehr has just under 182,000 soldiers, including 214 generals and admirals, a good 39,000 officers, 95,000 non-commissioned officers and 46,000 soldiers with enlisted ranks. Never before has it had so few soldiers and at the same time so many organizational areas, staffs, commands and authorities as today. There is a term for this: top-heaviness. It makes for far too many interfaces and makes it difficult to assign and assume responsibility. This is a typical characteristic of a peacetime army. It produces bureaucrats and encourages them.

The Bundeswehr is an administrative army. This is ensured not only by more than 80,000 civilian employees, but also by tens of thousands of soldiers whose activities are more akin to those in large government agencies than to those of a force training for the real thing. These administrative soldiers do not generate combat power. In the event of war, they do not sit in trenches and positions, battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, ships and submarines, but they do cost a lot of money. The Bundeswehr now spends half of its budget on personnel. But an army with too many "chiefs" for too few "Indians" is overwhelmed by the new confrontation in Europe. The war in Ukraine shows what matters in a conflict on the eastern flank.
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The Ministry of Defense has been trying to conceal the low ammunition levels for more than a year with reference to national security. Inquiries to this effect from the opposition have come to nothing. But information about the situation keeps leaking out. One is that warships such as the Corvette 130 can only leave with half their cargo of ammunition because there is no more. Another one was recently published by "Der Spiegel". According to the report, the Bundeswehr has only 20,000 artillery shells. To put that in perspective: At the meeting of EU defense ministers in Stockholm in March, Estonia presented a paper stating that Russia consumes between 20,000 and 60,000 artillery shells per day.
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But how do you prepare society and the armed forces in a democracy so that, in the event of war, they do not give up immediately after the first losses? That is a question of political leadership in an existential situation. Perhaps by saying today what would be expected: four percent casualty rate per combat brigade every single day or, in other words, 200 killed and wounded per 5,000 soldiers every day. This is how the Bundeswehr Medical Service predicted it four years ago in an internal study.