Discussion UsefulNotes / WeAreNotTheWehrmacht

I added a few lines about Germany spending an additional 100 Billion €. Details on what the money is going to be spend on, should better be added by someone who knows more about the Bundeswehr.

Everyone,

I've added the new Sec Def and will be doing some reworking in the next couple of hours; because I think some of the information provided is a bit too clichéd. (No offense to the contributor intended.) FYI, The information I change and add comes from personal experience and the documents, handbooks etc. I still own.

Cheers!

I don't think the picture really suits the tone and purpose of a Useful Notes page. We have an overall informative page with an image that invites mockery.

I don't have anything that fits better, unfortunately, but I figured I'd bring it up in hopes someone else would.

1) how much of the newest Sov military equipment the Nationalvolksarmee got depended on how well Erich Hoenecker was getting along with Moscow any given year. They did get some T72s and Mi G29s that weren't "monkey models" in the early 80s but other than that most years found themselves a relatively low priority. Note the lack of BTR APCs later than the BTR 70, self-propelled artillery pieces of heavier caliber than 122mm, or armed helicopters more advanced than the early-1970s Mi 8 E and Mi 24 A, for example, to be found in their TO&E.

2) despite this, in the event of World War III, the Warsaw Pact plan was that the NVA would be integrated into Soviet formations at an army level. For example, the Sov Third Shock Army's Order of Battle was officially the Sov 10th, 12th, and 47th Guards Tank Divisions plus the East German 7th Panzer Division. They're the ones who got the T72s, but were not trusted to have T80s.

3) the Bundeswehr may not have had much of a history of foreign deployments, either before or after unification, but the Nationalvolksarmee certainly for most of the 70s and 80s had many tens of thousands of conscript "advisors" on detached duty fighting essentially as Janissaries to prop up assorted pro-Sov regimes in sub-Saharan Africa (Angola particularly) and, though it is harder to confirm, there are persistent rumors that a few thousand also appeared in Nicaragua in the early 80s, there to train the locals in the finer points of counterinsurgency warfare and surveillance of known, suspected, or purely imagined dissidents and subversives. There are even rumors that they assisted the thousands of Cuban "advisors" in-country to arm and train assorted local "revolutionaries" (by which we mean FMLN and Cinchoneros terrorists), though, again, this is difficult to document at a distance of thirty years.

Deleted the part about conscription, because it was recently "deferred". Which means it could be reinstored at any time, but it won`t be.

Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. Discuss.