Germany's procurement process is badly broken. This is a Perun from over a year ago, but it is the best explanation I've seen on just how messed up their system is
The dysfunction is extensive and systemic. If the Germans want to fix it, it's going to take a lot of effort.
Dictatorships are different, but in any liberal democracy, the leader of the country is not responsible for all the ills of the state. In many cases they are trying in vain to buck a tide created by their legislature or bureaucracies. It's easy to complain and blame it all on the leader at the top, and in some countries opposition parties work to break things and try to blame it on the other party's guy at the top. In these cases it's now baked into the plan.
I don't see this happening in Germany so much as the Bundestag is an animal created by the winners of World War II. The Allies worked hard after WW II to de-nazify Germany. Germany today is more anti-Nazi that some of the Allied countries from WW II. But an anti-war culture took hold in Germany. It was not as active during the cold war because West Germany had to stand strong against the Warsaw Pact and they knew they would be on the front lines if the cold war ever went hot.
But the peace-niks really took over once the cold war ended. The idea that war with Russia would be impossible if they became deeply entangled with Germany became the core foreign policy agenda. Germany rushed to sell everything Russia needed to make whatever it wanted, including weapons and in exchange they bought most of their fossil fuels from Russia.
As we know, the failure of this policy became glaringly apparent in early 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. But the peace-niks are still mostly there in Germany's government and they really don't like this whole war thing. Many of them know Germany needs to be on more of a war footing, but they have spent the last three decades hamstringing the German military to a point that it's a Gordian Knot. And being peace-niks they don't know where to start untangling the mess they made.
Blaming the leader of a country for all its ills is like blaming the head coach of a sports team when all the players on the team are third rate players none of the other teams in the league wanted. The best leader in the world can't succeed if the rot extends well below the top post in the country. Scholz has not stood out as a great leader trying to fight the tide, but the problem isn't just his.
I find Perun’s latest video uplifting; lots more weapons production going on by our and Ukraine’s allies.
That said… nothing really good will come of ANY of these weapons; won’t everyone’s quality of life drop and global inflation take off as resources are diverted from producing anything actually useful and fun to build this fossil fuel-chugging stuff?
In an emergency you have to do what you have to do. The upside is that the economies of the west are so massive that it isn't really diverting much from the civilian economy. Most of this extra activity is being done at defense plants that already existed which are seeing an increase in production. It might divert a little effort from civilian projects because workers are being drawn into these projects and not civilian ones, but the numbers are pretty small compared to the entire economy.
www.newsweek.com
