S7Be

IMO, it’s not just training and equipment — the Moroccan military is sort’ve an oversized ‘Palace Army’, in the style of the Gulf militaries. They have a handful of large military schools located in large cities (now, that’s not too out of the ordinary, but it’s a problem when you’re trying to scale a large military). Their combat brigades are concentrated in a relatively small number of bases, which doesn’t seem like a problem until you look at these bases and see that “oh, they store their armored vehicles outside in giant ‘blow me up’ clusters.” Another “ehhhhh” example, they stash their 20 something F-16s at at most 2 airbases — great for maintenance and logistics, not great if you don’t want them all to be blown up. The Algerian military doesn’t really have the same problems. For the regular army and naval infantry, for most of their units their material is stored under cover/inside. Their larger formations have their own campuses the size of small towns, and they’re split-up/well distributed. Every branch and sub-branch of the Algerian military has its own college (there’s even a dedicated school for military communications, and another school for military basing/castrametation). It’s very much a miniature Soviet Red Army, except they actually seem to maintain their shit.

/ Iskander-E / Video showing Iskander-E live fire test during an exercise of the Algerian Military

I don’t think Gerard wants to learn why the Moroccan government (Israel’s closest and only consistent ally in MENA) scooped up 60k of its own citizens and told them to “go enter Spain.” Now, personally, I’m not opposed to that wave of migrants — it was a bunch of young probably decently well-educated dudes, and God knows the EU needs the labor. But this was in effect an actual invasion — not the “migrant invasions” that hare-brained far righters whine about. The Moroccan government announced on social media “hey, anyone who wants to can enter Ceuta today”, and had its gendarmes (read, armed government officials) truck whoever showed up over to the border, and told them where to go. This wasn’t a wave of people who were organically fleeing somewhere or something (as most refugees or economic migrants are).