Bundeswehr

That's just how it is.

However, The Bundeswehr, like the German Army, asked us to participate in a very important experiment.

And so we couldn't say no to that.

And so we went there with a system that we knew is not at our ambition level.

And you can see them moving very fast now to get themselves organized.

I see even today reports that they are buying Ukrainian missiles, that the Ukrainians have been developing cheap, sort of low-cost cruise missiles for the Bundeswehr inventory.

So that's a sign that we are not only having to help Ukraine, but we are being helped by Ukraine.

They have anti-drone technology that we all need, frankly, because we don't have good air defenses here.

And the next day, they talk with their teachers.

I saw companies of the Bundeswehr, of the German army.

It was also talking about the problem.

Because, you know, this is a living history.

Adjusting it before it can or is exploited is truly what matters.

Our next story takes us to Germany, where the country's military has issued a serious warning about the growing threat of Russian sabotage against its armed forces and military installations.

According to Reuters, Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, have classified the threat of Russian sabotage as significant, the second highest level on their internal threat assessment scale.

This is the first time the threat has been assessed at this level.

The reassessment follows the discovery in September of a crashed drone near Wunstorf military base in Lower Saxony.

Now, less than a month later, Germany is raising its own military sabotage threat assessment.

This is a significant progression.

We have moved from examining individual incidents involving electrical grids, communication infrastructure, and transportation networks, to a formal military assessment warning that German armed forces themselves may face direct attacks.

So yeah, I always liked getting a folio game.

And last year I didn't get a chance to come to Fall Assembly, but the year before I played Bundeswehr.

So got to do that.

So that's, I think that's something we got to keep on the menu for future ones, because those you can always kind of just pick up, show somebody how to play in about 10 minutes.

Russia arrested a German and accused him for fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine's military.

The FSB claims he is a former Bundeswehr soldier who served from 1996 to 2010, and who served in Afghanistan and Somalia between 2004 and 2010.

He later served in Syria as a mercenary, and between 2016 and 2018, he served with the Ukrainian Armed Forces fighting in the Donbass region, again, according to the FSB.

Russia has been arresting foreign nationals as of late to create a prisoner swap pool with the West.

German reunification.

And so we're walking around in kind of the heart and staying actually in the heart of the target area in downtown kind of beautiful Dresden and talking through issues of like, well, what brought U.S. and British forces here? And how was it that even though it was primarily British forces that destroyed Dresden, that somehow in the Cold War, this became an American crime? And we also spend a lot of time in Dresden, not a lot, a significant amount of time in Dresden, at the Bundeswehr Military History Museum, which is the museum that Corey hates.

And it's a very interesting place to kind of talk through strategic narrative because what do you do with a military history museum in Germany? And what's the narrative that that museum can give? And it's something that our students and most Americans, frankly, aren't exposed to.

It's a very kind of effectively... anti-war war museum.

What it does is like this isn't just us seeing some cool stuff in a museum.

The narrative of the museum and the argument of the museum is also grappling with, because it's the official museum of the Bundeswehr, the kind of self-identity of one of our most important allies and partners in Europe.

And how they are conceiving of their own record of past military service, of current rearmament, of NATO operations and their role in NATO, of Ukraine, of the Zeitenwende and increased defense spending and a plan to kind of take a more active role in defense policy and what that looks like.

And so you can learn, we talked, we went and how this works is, you know, we give student presentations at different sites and we have discussions based on background readings at different sites, but also sometimes then we pull off and have a separate seminar discussion just based on what we've seen at the sites that we were at.