He told me that people are not happy about politics intervening and dissolving units. It's a mindset of the armed forces seeing themselves as a state within a state I guess. It is not even about tolerating neo-nazis within their ranks, but being unhappy that an outsider like the ministry of defence got involved. I think having a minister who has been active military would help healing this divide. But we haven't had that for more than 30 years, instead that job has been become kind of meme as a job Merkel gives people to get rid of them.
It is sort of a token job for a politician looking to move up (not down) in the world in the Netherlands.
They see it as a thing that needs to be 'managed' preferably by a woman and there's always something left to cut in the budget.
Up until the point that our armed forces no longer had ammo and went to fight in Syria only to find out their radar systems were so outdated they couldn't even do missions.
Or that time they bought outdated mortars scrapped by the Americans that literally blew up in their face and cost the lives of a bunch of servicemen during training.
Our brief stint in Africa takes the cake though. A few years back they lost a helicopter there and sorta had to beg local warlords to give it back after a failed raid to retrieve it in which they lost another helicopter.
I would say our Marines, submarines and Commando's are the best equipped and trained. Our tanks we rent from Germany for practice from time to time.
Outside of some specialist stuff in any real 'war' the Dutch army would be a platoon in the Germany army which in turn would be a division of the French or Polish army at this point.
Cameron actually had some decent ideas to integrate Dutch, German, French and English defense. But the Germans balked at the last minute (as did the Dutch).
