[RecruitMonty]

I never said they needed to get their "Prussian militarism" back just the élan and high standards that it entailed. An army needs good morale to be effective in any kind of deployment be it a humanitarian one or one involving combat. Hearkening back to some of the older German military traditions (obviously not the unsavoury ones) will help to bolster that.

What it will be used for is anyone’s' guess. Just because we are on a defensive footing and/or fighting "rogue-states" and terrorists today does not mean that we won't be facing bigger and better equipped forces tomorrow. Trying to predict the sort of opponents we will face in the future by just focusing on present conflicts and then throwing all our eggs in one basket (as the modern Western military establishment seems to enjoy doing) is a stupid and ironically short-sighted way of running the military.

It would be best to maintain training standards and practices at a high level (in Germany that would mean lengthening the time conscripts had to stay in the service, something I believe you would support, and increasing the quality and scope of their training and pay). Focussing on Symmetrical warfare and operations of an offensive and defensive nature should be the norm for regular units.
Recruits and/or conscripts that show promise or are in special units should also be trained to fight A-symmetrically. If the defence budget is high enough then even regular units can be trained in similar ways (depending on the combat they are likely to face).

As for the right way to run counter terrorist deployments, well there are two ways I can think of for dealing with that sort of operation: one is messy, inhumane, expensive and long and drawn out. This would involve the deployment of large amounts of combat troops and equipment to the region where the terrorists etc were (like the USA and NATO forces are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan)

The other is equally expensive, smaller in scale, equally brutal but less likely to involve large numbers of your (whichever counry you represent) troops. Instead specialist troops can act as "advisors" to a local force the counter-insurgency).

Both methods have been used in the past (the Germans fought a fairly succesful if somewhat brutal anti-partisan campaign against the Russians and the Yugoslavs, the Americans used special forces to train Montagnards in Vietnam, the Russians fought the Afghans by using similar anti-partisan tactics as the Germans did in WWII in Afghanistan). Neither way is clean and neither way is quick. That is something the West is no longer willing to come to terms with, I fear.

With that said let me return to the subject at hand. Thank you very much for your answers Alpha. Anyone else here an old Bundesheer Soldat?