Germany suspends military approval for long stays abroad for men under 45

Article 12a of the German constitution states:

"(1) Men may be called up for service in the armed forces, the Federal Border Guard, or a civil defence unit upon reaching the age of eighteen."

The current administration has a majority, I think three votes (excuse my inaccuracy), to change the constitution. Women can fight as well, and they do. But there is currently no legal, constitutional way to officially draft them.

Some of the toughest soldiers I trained were women. I got put on my back on international cqc training exchanges by Israeli women more often than by anyone else.

Also, most of the high-profile politicians only have daughters, take the German Chancellor (two daughters) or the Prime Minister of Bavaria (1 1/2 daughters). They don’t have any personal interest that their daughters might get drafted. That’s another dimension to the problem.

Women in general are a great military asset, as they provide a non-male perspective you won’t get only working with testosterone-dominated brains.

It’s not like women don’t want to protect their fellow citizens.

It’s that the German military has huge structural problems to include them into the force properly, and the people in charge also know that, for a lot of men serving, they are still not equal, and a lot of men in the service don’t want to fight alongside a woman and trust them to have their back.

It’s a mix of toxic masculinity bred inside the military and a lack of combat experience alongside women. If you ask any American or Israeli soldier who fought alongside women in actual combat, it will be tough to find anyone to critique their value as soldiers or questioning their equality in the service.

I also appreciate your female perspective on this very much. But Sweden, in terms of gender equality, is miles ahead of Germany in many places. And to be fair, Swedish women live a more independent and less male-reliant model of relationships and live than most people on this planet.

The German defence minister acknowledges this, btw, by often talking about how implementing the "Swedish model" would raise a next generation of soldiers with a more modern view of freedom and responsibility that is more balanced between the genders than the current conservative societal model in Germany that is the man goes to work, the woman stays at home and takes care of the kids and the man fights to protect them if necessary.

You defend yourself, your family, your relatives and your friends.

You are not strong enough to defend these by yourself, so you can do this only by joining the army of the country in such cases.

It would be great if these kinds of actions would have become unnecessary in the modern society, but wars are still started by despicable humans like Putin, Trump and their associates, and there are even hundreds of millions of people who appear to approve such actions.

In the distant past there have existed a few "civilized" wars, where for much of the population it did not matter who won the war, because that just meant that they would pay the same taxes as before to a different authority, but they would just go on with their lives.

However, this has never happened again in modern wars.

In modern wars, the winners do not really have any use for the inhabitants of the occupied territory, so even when they avoid to kill them, they will just steal in one form or another most of what they own and they will discriminate them in various ways.

Especially the Russians have a long history of stealing everything they could from their neighbors after winning any war against them and making any conquered people 2nd class citizens, who had to give up their language, culture and history, and replace that with praising their Russian conquerors, rebranded as "liberators".

So when faced with something like a Russian invasion, which is a real risk for any neighbor of Russia, there is only one way of survival, which is "defending the country".

This is not some theory devoid of content, like the propaganda that American soldiers should invade for instance Cuba, because this "defends the interests of their country" (which is code for defending the interests of a few ultra-rich people).

When you are in Europe, there is a non-null risk that you might be forced in the future to "defend your country", as the only means for your own survival.

Because as a man myself I honestly wouldn't be able to say which privileges I've lost that my forefathers enjoyed, besides sexism with impunity. In fact, I have it easier, for the time being at least. No military conscription for one. And with the recognition that the patriarchy hurts all I've been able to actualize myself in a way that is more authentic to myself than the constraints of past generations would have allowed.