[heyheyhouhou]

German industry is changing a lot loosing against China, so they have been moving to war related stuff for the past years. Personally, I know a bunch of people who were offered get transferred from VW to a military drone company.

On one side I understand that manufacturing a lot of weapons could be somehow a protection for the future, but also Germany provides a lot of ammunition to Israel that is killing thousands of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon. Germany is friend of Israel despite many people disliking it in Germany (they are still waving Israeli flags in many official places).

Also, weapons will lead to more weapons, more violence and more war, specially if you have investors behind willing to see their shares going up...

[julianeon]

In the US and Germany, economists say that war and defense companies have to pay a "social stigma premium" since average people don't really like to work there given equal wages. The premium is a revealed preference: even people who wouldn't articulate a moral objection are implicitly expressing one through their labor market behavior.

So if you look at how they behave, it seems that many people agree.

[jrumbut]

I work for a non-defense government employer and my working conditions are so much better than my friends and relatives who did the same job in defense.

I have never gotten searched, neither my car nor my person, at work. I don't need elaborate and heavily monitored setups to work remotely. I didn't have to take a polygraph or answer detailed questions about my past to get or keep my job.

Also, my employer can hire people who actively use cannabis and people without citizenship which expands the labor pool substantially. My workplace does not have a 30 minute line for security when I arrive.

Not all those things apply to every defense but many do and I would want a premium if I had to deal with them. Also the customer for defense goods is not very sensitive to price but is often extremely sensitive to quality and/or timeline.

[chneu]

Most people give a crap until it affects them personally. Then the extra effort nullifies their give a crap.

Not saying this as a negative. It's just how most people work. We all have excuses and reasons for why, in our special circumstances, it's okay.

People are inherently more selfish than we tend to want to believe. Just how we are.

[bitvvip]

This is a crazy world. Everyone should stay away from war

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

If your neighbor decides not to, the only way for you to stay away from the war is to have weapons to kill them before they get to you...

(Of course, the best solution to an aggressive neighbor is to have so many weapons that they know they would die if they attacked, so they don't even try.)

It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...

[cramsession]

> It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...

Israel (which Germany is providing weapons to) does nothing but attack its neighbors. A good portion of the imperialist aggression coming from the US is also done on Israel's behalf. Germany is certainly complicit in this.

[kameit00]

Did you really read documents about the history? Your wording suggests 'no'.

[cramsession]

Which documents? The Balfour Declaration? History about Nakba? Civilian kill stats?

[ngruhn]

Unfortunately that's the default state of the world. The comparatively peaceful post WW2 period was the weird thing.

[cramsession]

We killed millions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think you can call it peaceful, more that "the west" exported its violence outside the borders of Europe and the US.

[cynicalsecurity]

Good luck staying away from war when someone else decides to attack you.

[starik36]

> Provides a lot of ammunition to Israel that is killing thousands of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon

I love how you just casually throw this out there as if it's an accepted fact. Casualty figures in Gaza/Lebanon are heavily disputed and have been from the get go. Hamas health ministry numbers don't distinguish combatants from civilians, ignore Hamas's use of human shields and embedding in civilian areas, or account for misfires/own goals. "Innocents" is subjective in urban warfare against groups like Hamas and Hezbollah (both designated terror orgs by many countries), whose charters and actions explicitly target Israeli civilians.

> weapons will lead to more weapons, more violence and more war

This is naive at best, dangerous at worst - western, white savior thinking. Weakness invites aggression. Example Russia's invasions or Hamas's Oct 7 attack. Deterrence matters and has mattered since day immemorial (cold war, for instance).

Arms races don't automatically lead to wars - they have deeper roots like ideology, territory, resources, etc... One-sided restraint has sometimes led to worse outcomes. Example here would be 1930s appeasement.

[varispeed]

I find it puzzling why they won't pivot to industries that actually matter like making competition to Micron or Samsung and manufacture RAM at scale.

Amping up military production is basically a reaction to certain countries electing maniacal pedos as presidents instead of jailing them.

[alex43578]

Precision manufacturing has been Germany’s thing for a while, but semiconductors is a completely different skill set.

Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.

[noosphr]

And you won't get electric tanks for many decades. Where else could you hawk ICE at a premium without environmental regulations?

[alex43578]

You won’t get electric tanks for the same reason you won’t get electric planes: energy density and supply chains.

An Abrams has a multi-fuel jet turbine that’ll take diesel, gas, and jet fuel; all of which are easy to transport and store in bulk, in any environment, compared to needing to generate and store the same quantity of energy.

The closest tanks will come any time soon is a diesel-electric hybrid, for noise and electric load purposes (EW, lasers, etc).

[FuckButtons]

Because those are very capital intensive and don’t skew towards germanys existing competitive advantage in diesel engines and high precision heavy engineering. Same reason most places don’t try to compete, it’s cost prohibitive to do so.

[amarant]

When Russia is knocking at your door, weapons do matter.

Even moreso than cellphones.

[hkpack]

It is upsetting that you get downvoted. I think people in the US are thinking that a war is impossible or something, and looking for a stereotypical response.

Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real.

And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable.

Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power.

Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions.

You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth.

And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.

[throwaway894345]

Presumably because those markets are difficult to break into whereas Germany can sell defense equipment to allied countries pretty easily (they don’t need to compete with China because Germany’s allies largely don’t want to be dependent on China militarily for geopolitical reasons).

[jyounker]

Because Russia is waging open war with one of Germany's allies, and has been preparing for war against the Baltic states.

It's not like Germany is far away either. The Western edge of Ukraine is, in some places, closer to Berlin than the Western edge of Germany.

[Levitz]

If we are going to look outside the country for blame, China and Russia are right there.

Not being able to trust US protection as much as in the past is evidently a terrible state of affairs, but this isn't the root of the problem.

[Barrin92]

we're currently (indirectly) engaged in the largest land war since WW II in Europe so weapons do matter. But also the second part of that sentence isn't true, the former East German States, Saxony in particular have been building out a pretty strong microelectronics industry. See: https://silicon-saxony.de/en/

[karunamurti]

Even nitrocellulose for ammunition is produced in Xinjiang. So still depends on China.