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Berlin (dpa) - General Inspector Eberhard Zorn cannot understand the SPD's resistance to the rapid acquisition of combat drones for the Bundeswehr.
"From my point of view, the military need for an armed drone remains unchanged," said Zorn of "Welt am Sonntag".
"And not at some point, but in the missions abroad that we are experiencing today."
The acquisition is necessary to improve the protection of soldiers from the air and their capabilities on the ground.
"Otherwise I will force our troops into cover and condemn them to inactivity instead of allowing their active action," Zorn told the newspaper.
Critics counter that armed drones can lower the inhibition threshold for the use of military force because they are controlled remotely and their own soldiers are not endangered when used.
Unlike parts of the SPD, the highest-ranking Bundeswehr soldier sees no reason to question the purchase of armed drones in the course of the bloody conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Caucasus.
“In Nagorno-Karabakh, armed drones were used as attack weapons.
The use of armed drones by the Bundeswehr, on the other hand, would be subject to clear rules that our parliament would have approved in advance and defined in the respective mandate. "
Zorn assured us that there would be no use of drones by the Bundeswehr as in Nagorno-Karabakh.
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In the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, Azerbaijan achieved victories with intensive drone warfare.
For the first time - as German military experts have observed - entire front lines were changed with drone attacks.
For him, the conclusion from the conflict between the two ex-Soviet republics in the South Caucasus is different anyway, said Zorn.
«We urgently need to improve our air defense capabilities.
Very high-flying drones that were armed were used in Nagorno-Karabakh.
And there were smaller, more or less freely available commercial drones that are increasingly able to transport larger containers of explosives. "
Both of these mean a growing threat to land forces in the future.
“We need defensive systems that protect our troops against such attacks.
We have to close this skill gap quickly. "
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210103-99-879245 / 2