If you drive through Switzerland these days, a tank will come towards you.
Army trucks stop at highway rest stops.
Under the code name "Pilum 22", four "mechanized battalions" and one company of mountain infantry diligently practice "standard procedures and operations against armed groups".
The soldiers of a unit specializing in electronic warfare have also received marching orders.
The Swiss Army's maneuvers are the most complex since the end of the Cold War.
In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Switzerland had celebrated the start of the Second World War fifty years earlier - from which it had been spared.
If there had been an emergency German attack at that time,
defend country and people
A new strategy is now required in order to be able to "defend the country and its people on the ground," the army command explains its manoeuvres.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine has made gas, oil and electricity supplies a problem.
It fuels the debates about neutrality and the Swiss hedgehog mentality of isolation.
Switzerland, where it is almost impossible to build a football stadium, is planning gigantic solar systems above the clouds.
In Grengiols, where the sun doesn't shine for weeks in the valley, square kilometers of panels are to be erected.
Homeland and landscape protection will be relaxed in order to make Switzerland self-sufficient from the sky.
She, too, now has a utopia.
But until they are implemented, the government is rehearsing the emergency.
Like a general staff, she prepares the population for him.
Discos in the dark
At the start of the military maneuvers, she published her battle plan.
It consists of four stages.
The first bans will affect the leaf blowers and seat heaters on the chairlifts.
Temperatures have to be lowered, hotels are closing their minibars.
In further steps - the four "escalation levels" - the ambiance in discotheques (light intensity, fog machines) is regulated until Netflix in HD is banned.
During the pandemic, the government had been extremely successful in appealing for obedience and personal responsibility, while also conducting police checks.
The experts consider an emergency blackout to be rather unlikely, because the gas storage facilities and reservoirs are full.
The bureaucratic catalog of measures, which at first glance reads like the clumsy instructions for use for an eco-dictatorship,
is more likely to be understood as a long-term contribution of intellectual national defense to the military simulation games of the army.
On the site they come to an end this Tuesday.
The government promises that any damage will be “compensated in principle”.
A hotline provides information about the current traffic disruptions caused by tanks.