"There's a nice saying: tough times make strong people and strong people make good times. But good times make weak or naive people, and that's where we are right now," explains Daniel Schäfer, a survival expert based in Berlin.

He's discussing Germany's overall preparedness for war and crisis situations both at home and abroad and it is fair to say he has some concerns.

Schäfer is a former reservist with Germany's Rapid Reaction Force (KRK), served in Yugoslavia, and later worked for Berlin's Criminal Police Office. Today he runs survival training camps and is the author of a survival handbook.

His company SurviCamp trains around 2,000 members of the public a year on courses ranging from all-weather survival weekends in the German wilderness to bushcraft training days where participants can learn how to butcher wild animal carcasses and light fires the old-fashioned way.

These are all skills he believes more people should acquire as a matter of basic homeland security, and says Germany could learn a thing or two from Finland where the military trains civilians without them having to become soldiers.

During a closely-watched debate in the Bundestag on Thursday, conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) leader and would-be Chancellorr Friedrich Merz tried to win the support of the Greens for his proposed changes to the debt brake by also offering to expand the scope of defense spending to include civil defense and intelligence agencies.

With the United States' recent policy shift towards Europe, alarm bells are ringing about the state of the country's homeland defenses.

During a testy debate in the Bundestag on Thursday, conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) leader and would-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to win support for his proposed changes to the debt brake, which would allow for more spending on defense and infrasctruture, by also offering to spend more on civil defense and intelligence agencies.

As a reaction to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, German Defense Minster Boris Pistorius last year had already ordered a........

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