American General Ben Hodges was overseeing a military exercise in Europe when an unexpected incident occurred at a train station in Poland – dozens of Bradley armored vehicles sped into the building, some of them seriously damaged when their turrets were torn off after hitting the station’s platform roof.
“Nobody was injured,” Hodges said, at that time the commander of the American forces in Europe. In the meantime, the general has retired. “However, there were thousands of dollars in damages and we ended up with ten armored vehicles that couldn’t be ready for battle for a significant period of time.”
A decade later, collapsing bridges, inadequate rail gauges, and the bureaucratic maze remain serious obstacles to the movement of military equipment across Europe, writes FT.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, France failed to send tanks to Romania on the shortest land route through Germany and decided to send them by sea, through the Mediterranean. These examples painfully remind us that Europe’s effort to rearm is not limited to just the effective procurement of weaponry or the increase in the number of troops.
Details, HERE