Bundeswehr recruiting

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The Bundeswehr has a recruiting problem. It doesn't really know how to recruit.

Decade after decade, young men were forced under the threat of arrest into military service. They were underpaid and easily available. The requirement for professional soldiers (for four, eight or ten years) was easily met by recruiting the most willing young men. Many young men also became interested in becoming professional soldiers knowing well that they had to serve some time anyway.

The downsizing since the early 90's made recruitment proficiency even less a priority. The new and increasing relevancy of out-of-area missions (where only volunteers including volunteering conscripts could be sent to) led to less and less conscripts in actual field units. Conscripts became more and more concentrated on the most shitty and often even outright useless jobs.

The classic image of a Cold War conscript included the main battle tank loader, the truck driver who got his driving license in the army and lots of infantrymen. Later it was more and more about gas station servants, sauna boys and depot workers doing one listing and inspection after another.

Meanwhile, soldier pay was not increased properly, so volunteer professionals experienced a rank inflation. Now if you cannot pay your enlisted volunteer properly for his AFV driver job, then you turn that job into a NCO job slot and pay someone a NCO's pay for it...

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Now the conscription is gone, and the Bundeswehr experiences a shortage of suitable volunteers. Finally, recruitment has to become competent (and just maybe military service has to become attractive again?).

The result are spin reports from military service such as this one. It's full of reassuring info that it isn't that bad, women can cope with it, trainers are nice and don't shout...

In short: The Bundeswehr is still totally incompetent in recruiting.

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The Bundeswehr isn't so unattractive because of hardships. It's so unattractive because it's a red tape bureaucracy with lots of B.S.. Young men don't become annoyed because of tough training - they become annoyed because of underemployment, visibly inadequate training, lack of training ammunition, lack of equipment, equipment older than their trainers, too much bookkeeping and request forms, lack of seriousness, no challenges = little if any moments of success, too old equipment and generally failures of the institution. Young men avoid the army because of horror stories about how soldiers were treated poorly by civil bureaucracy and in-service superiors. They hear stories about soldiers serving for weeks in sweat suits because there was no uniform in their size in stock at the barracks' depot.

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It's been an old and proven experience of the Bundeswehr itself that competent AND challenging training leads to very content and motivated troops.

A move towards a soft "Imagined it worse - the first week of voluntary military service" thing is counter-productive for training quality, personnel selection and motivation.

Who is being attracted by such a public relations work? 'No risk, little effort' lazy people and maybe women. The result will be a preparation for many failures such as the U.S. maintenance platoon that got ambushed and soundly defeated during the Iraq invasion because most of them believed they were technicians, not troops meant to be ready for a fight.

The Canadians had some recruiting problems a few years ago. Some observers blamed the combat in Afghanistan. Other observers pointed out that (counter-intuitively) the infantry was doing fine with its recruitment. There were many young men who were rather attracted, not deterred, by the idea of going to war. These recruits did often not enlist again because they were content with having had 'their war experience', but this kind of motivated men is nevertheless crucial for armies (not so much for air forces and navies). 

A soft basic training with no hardships and nice trainers, along with women who are allowed to wear some make-up is probably not the way to go if the Bundeswehr is still tasked with serious preparation for defence (or shitty military-political adventures).

Maybe - just maybe - the Bundeswehr should aim for a different demographic and present itself also to potential recruits as a competent organisation full of challenges and personal achievements?

It would help to get the organisation up to speed first, of course.

S O

P.S.: This was not about women. I care about the mindset, not about the extra body parts, of recruits.

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