No. of Recommendations: 13
So you want them to continue to pay the bill indefinitely?
I don't want them to continue to pay the bill indefinitely. What I want is for Russia to do the just and proper thing and withdraw to their pre-war border, since they engaged in an unprovoked and unjustified and (dare I say) evil attack on an innocent neighbor.
Recognizing that Russia won't do the right thing, neither do I think it is necessary or advisable to give Russia all of its war aims just to sue for peace. Ukraine can't force Russia out of its territory, but neither do they have to completely capitulate.
The other problem you have is that you're treating total dollars spent on defense like Time of Possession in football. It's an important metric but not the only one. The Germans are spending more and getting WORSE in terms of readiness.
They're not aiming to be ready as a standalone military force. That's the point. They're part of a multinational defense coalition, and their contribution to that defense coalition doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) allocated in the same way as you would expect if they were fielding a national defense on their own. You don't need every nation in Europe to have the same number of armored divisions as they would field if they were all stand-alone countries - because then you're wasting resources.
183k troops. They had 550k in 1990. Hardly a "massive" force, especially one with not so much equipment.
Still one of the biggest armies in the EU - only second to France.
Yes, it's far less than in 1990 = because the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up, and Poland and Czechoslovakia (to say nothing of East Germany) went from being Soviet satellite states to being independent (moving a possible front line with Russia a thousand miles away instead of being the German border). The Red Army went from having about 5 million active-duty forces in the mid-1980's to about a million today (well, fewer now). You need a military proportionate to the threats your country faces - and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany faced a different and lesser threat profile. Now it's Poland that's the front-line NATO country, and the Russia army is a fifth of what it was. So, yes - they still have a force that's plenty big enough to get involved in conflicts on the Continent, if it came to that.
