German Army Story

Focus brought up this short story over the German Army (Bundeswehr).

Just about every month for the past couple of years, some big negative has come out over supply-management issue within the German Army.  It's typically that tanks can't run because parts are in short supply, or aircraft are grounded because this part isn't in abundance.  Everyone in the Bundeswehr kinda laughs over the shortfalls because it's such a routine thing now. 

So in this episode today...it's about food....the rations that you'd tote around in your backpack for a couple of days out on the trail. 

In the German Army, they refer to these as 'one-man packages'.  A normal battalion would order via their military source these packages and they'd be used in training scenarios where you weren't in some camp or capable of getting hot meals via a traveling chow-hall.  This would be a situation where forty guys were going hiking for two days, and each guy needed two of these packages to sustain himself.

In a normal package, there would be food, utensils (plastic knives, forks, spoons) and some kind of coffee and juice mix

The typical 'main course'?  Well, a couple of years ago, there were five basic meals that you might end up with: beef patty with tomato sauce, vegetable stir fry, goulash, lentil stew with sausages, an Italian noodle dish, and Yugoslavian-style sausages.  There were usually two spreads in the package....a fruit-like spread, and a meat-like spread.  Bread and biscuits were usually included. 

You can figure for an entire day....there's probably five to six thousand calories in each package, if you ate every single item, and drank all the juicy-juice. 

Why the shortage?  No one is clear about this.  My humble guess is that there's only one or two companies in Germany who manufacture these and they tend to make a batch....then turn off the manufacture for a month or two, until they see a need to make more products.  So if some unit came up and said their stock was down to zero, and they wanted a pallet in ten days, the odds are that they'd have to wait thirty days for the purchase and delivery to occur. 

An embarrassment?  It's not something that you'd really like to discuss in a public forum or via the newspapers.