With the rising death toll the voices who question the whole mission are becoming louder here. Not many know a decent and satisfying answer to questions like- why are we risking our soldiers there and what are we actually doing in Afghanistan. Conscript soldiers recently posed these questions in a newly opened forum to the Minister of Defense and other high ranking military related persons, without getting a satisfying answer it seemed. For most soldiers it is all about the extra money (like in many more countries). With regards to the upcoming election the motion damanding to pullback German troops is getting stronger.
Any thoughts, ideas, propositions etc.?
Start the discussion please.

Create an all volunteer deploying unit.

Ditto for 13th, also make sure that the ROE are clear & simple, that enable the soldiers to do the job & ensure that hot heads don't get carried away.

Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck

Create an all volunteer deploying unit.

Good plan. Solves multiple problems at once.

That's what they do in the RoK Army.
They get volunteers from throughout the service, train together then ship off.
They even get the parents signatures so they don't go protesting about how their kid was coerced or manipulated into serving if thy do happen to pay the ultimate price.

Other units that do ship off as a unit do not take those who do not volunteer for overseas missions.

People still protest, but it minimizes their ammunition.

Not a bad idea. But this country unfortunately doesn't work like this. Either the whole country is involved and backing this mission or no one... what you are proposing is a "mercenary-like" system, I'm afraid that's not a possible solution here . Plus we would lack certain soldiers if we cannot order them to go over there, our military has only 250k soldiers- we are already at the deployment limit, how are we supposed to uphold all our missions abroad if we only send volunteers?

Really? There's a huge surplus of volunteers every time a deployment becomes a reality here.
It's true that the missions have so far been safe ones, but there was a huge surplus even back in 2003 when the word was that South Korean troops would be involved in combat operations. When it was not the case, a lot of folks were disappointed.

The question of how Germany could supply troops to aid in Afghanistan is considerably deeper than finding a way for troops to volunteer or just be ordered to go. The unified German military is less than 20 years old. I do not think the German people have a desire to support a strong military. Unification of Germany came officially on October 3rd, 1990.

Would be interested in hearing more input from our German forum members. Germany spent most of the second half of the 20th century as an occupied country.

I personally was 3 years old when the wall went down . And yes people don't want a strong military but considering our key-status in many international organizations and our geographical position- a strong force is required.

3 years old? Holy sh*t I feel old.