I work for a non-defense government employer and my working conditions are so much better than my friends and relatives who did the same job in defense.

I have never gotten searched, neither my car nor my person, at work. I don't need elaborate and heavily monitored setups to work remotely. I didn't have to take a polygraph or answer detailed questions about my past to get or keep my job.

Also, my employer can hire people who actively use cannabis and people without citizenship which expands the labor pool substantially. My workplace does not have a 30 minute line for security when I arrive.

Not all those things apply to every defense but many do and I would want a premium if I had to deal with them. Also the customer for defense goods is not very sensitive to price but is often extremely sensitive to quality and/or timeline.

Most people give a crap until it affects them personally. Then the extra effort nullifies their give a crap.

Not saying this as a negative. It's just how most people work. We all have excuses and reasons for why, in our special circumstances, it's okay.

People are inherently more selfish than we tend to want to believe. Just how we are.

If your neighbor decides not to, the only way for you to stay away from the war is to have weapons to kill them before they get to you...

(Of course, the best solution to an aggressive neighbor is to have so many weapons that they know they would die if they attacked, so they don't even try.)

It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...

Unfortunately that's the default state of the world. The comparatively peaceful post WW2 period was the weird thing.

Good luck staying away from war when someone else decides to attack you.

Precision manufacturing has been Germany’s thing for a while, but semiconductors is a completely different skill set.

Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.

Because those are very capital intensive and don’t skew towards germanys existing competitive advantage in diesel engines and high precision heavy engineering. Same reason most places don’t try to compete, it’s cost prohibitive to do so.

If we are going to look outside the country for blame, China and Russia are right there.

Not being able to trust US protection as much as in the past is evidently a terrible state of affairs, but this isn't the root of the problem.

When Russia is knocking at your door, weapons do matter.

Even moreso than cellphones.

Presumably because those markets are difficult to break into whereas Germany can sell defense equipment to allied countries pretty easily (they don’t need to compete with China because Germany’s allies largely don’t want to be dependent on China militarily for geopolitical reasons).

we're currently (indirectly) engaged in the largest land war since WW II in Europe so weapons do matter. But also the second part of that sentence isn't true, the former East German States, Saxony in particular have been building out a pretty strong microelectronics industry. See: https://silicon-saxony.de/en/