Of course, Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) lost confidence in Chief of Defense Flemming Lentfer. The only surprising thing about the latest development is that it didn’t happen many months ago.
At Christiansborg, trust in the senior leadership of the Defense Forces had evaporated a long time ago, and among the soldiers in the operational units, jokes about the Chief of Defense and the senior leadership have been rampant for a long time.
Unilateral planning and mistakes led to resignation
The reason is that Flemming Lentfer and his leadership have acted arbitrarily and surrounded themselves with back-patters without desire or will to involve the defense in his military professional advice, which was primarily his own project, which hit completely outside the scope in relation to political expectations .
Where politicians wanted to meet NATO’s strength targets more quickly, Flemming Lentfer questioned them and came up with a plan that favored his own air force.
Where the politicians expected a military technical presentation for the upcoming partial settlement negotiations with several options, Flemming Lentfer chose to give them his own plan alone.
At the same time, Flemming Lentfer has for several years warned against adding too much money to the Armed Forces too quickly because, according to him, it takes “seven years to buy and implement a new item of equipment in the Armed Forces”. On that basis, he quickly got the nickname “Flemming 7 years”, and it was not meant in a positive way.
When the story of all the problems on the frigate “Iver Huitfeldt” during the downing of four drones on March 9 hit the Minister of Defense without him having heard a word about them, the cup was just about to overflow.
The chief of defense was given a day to come up with an explanation, and even then he could not find out. The statement was leaked to TV2, and this made the Minister of Defense furious. Since it also contained errors and was replaced by another version an hour before the minister’s meeting with the settlement circle, Flemming Lentfer’s fate was sealed. And thank you for that.
Hope is not a defense strategy
Now Michael Hyldgaard has to solve the problems together with the Minister of Defence, and it is a challenging task to say the least, because the fact is that the Armed Forces are quite simply broken.
The equipment does not work and the personnel flee.
In order to send one frigate to the Red Sea, the Swedish Navy had to strip the remaining four of material, guns and personnel, which therefore sail back unfit for combat. The same is done by the ships in the North Atlantic, which have to go to the shipyard every other day due to breakdowns, and they also have no cannons that work, whereby Denmark does not live up to NATO’s strength targets on that point either.
The army could not deploy a paltry battalion of 800 men for more than 12 months to Latvia, which is why we already had to report to NATO in May 2023 and let other countries take over. In the Army, one in four constables is missing, and among the young officers, 13-14 percent leave the Armed Forces every year because a life as a civilian sounds more attractive.
In the Armed Forces, there is a lack of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, spare parts, night fighting equipment, camouflage nets, radios, binoculars and the infantry fighting vehicles are so worn out that they are transported on block wagons to the firing positions when they go to shooting camp.
In other words, the Danish defense in 2024 is a modern Potemkin backdrop, completely unable to defend anything. And while the billions are now being driven on pallets into the Ministry of Defence, the operational units have just been presented with new savings of millions for the rest of 2024, because the economy is not coming together.
During the Corona pandemic, the Prime Minister’s head of department, Barbara Bertelsen, said that “hope is not a strategy”. She should probably have conveyed that to the Ministry of Defence, where hope is eventually the only thing we as citizens have left to cling to.
The fact is that the Defense has collapsed.
Peter Ernstved Rasmussen is the host of the weekly debate program ‘Frontlinjen’ on Radio4 and is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the online media OLFI.
Peter Ernstved Rasmussen is a trained journalist from SDU in Odense, has a past as a reserve officer in Den Kgl. Lifeguard and has, among other things, been deployed as a UN soldier to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993 with the rank of sergeant and as a press and information officer to Iraq in 2004-2005 with the rank of temporarily appointed captain.
2024-04-06 13:55:11
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