Wounded sergeant reignites debate over Spain's underfunded military

A wounded sergeant and a country looking the other way

The image should be simple: a sergeant gets wounded and the first thing to do is ask how he is. Instead, the conversation jumps to the couch and from there to the same old question: what good is an army that neither defends the country nor its own? The incident, reported by El Mundo, has peine a rift that goes beyond the medical report.

Some put it with a rage that sounds like accumulated exasperation: a young man who comes out wounded should not be called a coward by someone opining from their living room. Against that current, another reading frames the problem where it hurts: the leadership, the budget and the orders. National defence would work like a beach kiosk that gets its ammunition cut while buying equipment that looks like collector's items. The comparison with the Ministry of Equality, which according to that version would have a bigger budget than Defence, condenses the discontent into a single sentence.

The debate extends to the Guardia Civil (Spain's militarised police force), the local police, the fire brigade and civil protection. Forces that are expected to do everything and are given very little. And in the case of Ceuta, agents who receive contradictory instructions: if they act, lawsuits from the Interior Ministry trinc and they are left in the lurch.

This is not a defence of incompetence, which exists too. It is a distinction that gets lost in the noise: confusing the minister with the agent eating the desert dust. The wounded man, meanwhile, still fails to appear in the war report of those opining from the couch. And the budget, that uncomfortable fact, does not either.