The military’s salaries, pensions and benefits have been slashed to the bone; and the operating budget has been put to the butcher’s bloc as if all risk to the Nation has vanished and Greece exists in a sea of peace and prosperity.
As Greece’s ability to defend herself steadily diminishes thanks to her own government’s schizophrenic austerity policies Greece’s neighbors haven’t abandoned their own strategic aims dating as far back as the early part of the previous century. Among them, the severest threat emerges from Turkey, presently involved in a neo-Ottoman, expansionist strategy of whose one primary aim is Turkish domination over the Aegean and the hydrocarbon-rich waters around Cyprus. An old Turkish friend, Germany, has already delivered the double whammy for our “friends” in Ankara: Greece lies in tatters, exhausted and hemorrhaging, and Cyprus has been also destroyed economically in the space of a few days.
Against this backdrop, the Greek armed forces are weakened by their own government in what looks increasingly like deliberate action. If Mr. Samaras and his confederates do not realize the impact of castrating the Nation’s defense force, then they are dangerous and must be dispatched by the voters a.s.a.p. If, on the other hand, they are aware of what they are doing and persist in doing it, their actions must be obviously subject to different scrutiny to discover the true motives behind defense cuts that no defense establishment would suffer without degradation to the point of operational denial.
In the post-junta years, the Greek armed forces have suffered in the hands of politicians of all party hues. Subject to a policy recognizing the Nation’s defense establishment as suspect of another incursion into politics, army, navy, and air force were maliciously undermined by political meddling into every facet of operations and thoroughly politicized in choosing their leadership. The net result of all this “democratic cleansing” was that the armed forces were gradually but irrevocably demoralized and undermined as a fighting force in order to fulfill political obsessions and quixotic antics. It was in this tradition of deliberate humiliation that the Papandreou government (the very same that pressed the IMF/EU shackles upon Greece) spread “leaks” to suggest the Greek military could be preparing a coup while Papandreou drove Greece over the cliff in 2011.
As we speak, Greece faces an unprecedented defense emergency. Austerity budgets have strategically undermined the capability of the armed forces to defend the country. In the Aegean, the primary theater of continuing Turkish belligerence and threats of war, the Greek armed forces, and especially their air arm, have retreated from even a minimum of muscle flexing to deal with daily Turkish provocations designed to probe and throw the Greeks off balance. Under the circumstances, a Turkish stab, like the 1996 Imia Crisis, can develop into a major defeat for Greece.
The Greek bankruptcy has starkly highlighted the defining disconnect between the Greek people and servile and cowardly governments staffed by the same men and women who brought Greece to her knees. No wonder that, again, commanding majorities in opinion surveys find that no present politician or party can save the day. With Greek armed defense cracking, the economic disaster could be soon joined by a national disaster caused by external threats – and this conclusion does not even begin to address the domestic threat of violence thanks to unstoppable, mainly Islamic, illegal immigration.
