So I've been hinting before at the vague possibility of there being a rant on the status of the conversation on security policy in Germany in the future of this blog, right? I've been kind of procrastinating on it because I knew it would be a long, rambling and possibly not really intelligible post because I'm just so fed up with the vast ( Read more... )

Anyway, as in Germany the beginning of the carnival season will be celebrated, I turn my back on the crazy, not in the least funny people and will keep up with my Anglophone flisters and salute our veterans of the war in Afghanistan, deployments to Kosovo, Bosnia, Djibouti, Uganda, Lebanon and wherever else German Armed Forces soldiers, sailors and ( Read more... )

This is the German Armed Forces' newest image/recruiting video ad (the catch phrase is "Wir. Dienen. Deutschland."/"We. Serve. Germany." and though I don't really know what to make of the periods I'm slowly starting to warm up to the phrase.Very slowly. Maybe.) :

Click to view

What do we think, people?

Good? Bad? Ridiculous?

(One thing that really shook me: the ( Read more... )

I guess 9/11 is my generation's Kennedy assassination. We all knew where we were and what we did when we heard about the attacks. This is the story of where I was and what I did.

( Remember, remember, the Eleventh of September. )

or at least contemplate ordering one from gelbe-schleife.de, Germany's equivalent to the (much bigger) Yellow Ribbon Campaign in the US, if you're a German and are tired of the "friendly desinterest" people here in Germany are giving the Armed Forces, the soldiers and most of all their deployments

Why am I saying this? Because fighting season is in ( Read more... )

Well. I'm officially revising everything about not being shocked about German soldiers dying in Afghanistan in my last post.

Why? Because of this: Afghanistan: suicide blast kills top police commander. There were also several ISAF casualties, three two of them German soldiers. It also appears as if RC-North commander Major General Markus Kneip ( ( Read more... )

I just read in my news RSS that another German soldier was killed in Afghanistan and to be honest, I was a little shocked about myself. Why? Because I wasn't shocked. Or at least not as shocked as I used to be about dead German soldiers in Afghanistan (remember, dead and wounded soldier are still something the German public rather rather remembers ( Read more... )

So Osama's dead.

First thing I though was: "So... what?"

Second thing was: "Are they stupid? It's like a fucking hydra's head. Cut off one of them, you get three new ones."

( Please tell me you didn't all lose your brains over the death of that old man. )

Who said Germany would send soldiers to Libya even despite foolishly abstaining from voting for a military invention? Who did? Who did?

That's right, I did! ( here, to be precise)

And I was right, as not only daily Der Tagesspiegel but also weekly DIE ZEIT and MilBlogger Thomas Wiegold have confirmed (all in German, though). Apparently, the German ( Read more... )

Today, the UN Security Council finally passed the NFZ resolution for Libya. As predicted, Germany who's currently a temporary member, abstained. This is so very embarrassing and a fucking bad idea that I don't even know where to start. This isn't like Iraq where Bush tried to push the allies into a war based on assumptions and downright lies and ( Read more... )