There is an old joke about a German conscript preparing for his first jump with the paratroopers. As they are getting ready to leap out the plane the sergeant says: “Men! When you’re at 1,000 metres, pull the cord and the parachute will open. If it doesn’t, pull the other cord, and the backup parachute will open. Once you’ve landed the lorry will collect you.”
The conscript jumps and pulls the cords as instructed, but neither parachute opens. “Bloody German army,” he says as he plummets to certain death. “I bet the lorry won’t be there either.”
Germany’s armed forces, known as the Bundeswehr, are well used to being on the receiving end of this kind of humour. For years they have been plagued by chronic procurement problems, shortages of equipment and malfunctioning hardware: warplanes that can’t fly, tanks with no gun barrels, soldiers sent into the Baltic winter with no rain jackets or warm underwear. Their own generals have complained that they are in no condition to defend Germany, let alone the eastern borders of Europe.
Now, though, they appear to be on the brink of a Zeitenwende, the threshold of a new era. Three days after the first Russian rockets hit Kyiv, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, made an extraordinary speech to the Bundestag, having consulted only a handful of his closest aides beforehand.
“At its core,” he said, “this is about the question of whether force can break justice, whether we allow Putin to turn the clocks back to the time of the great powers of the 19th century, whether we can muster the power to set boundaries for warmongers such as Putin. That requires a strength of our own.”
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Then came the substance: Scholz, 63, would set up a “special fund” of €100 billion, nearly twice the annual defence budget, to modernise the armed forces. He would also immediately raise spending on the military from 1.5 per cent of Germany’s economic output to 2 per cent, the Nato target, for the first time since 1991.
It was time, Scholz said, for a “national effort of will” to forge a “capable, ultra-modern Bundeswehr that can dependably protect us”.
For Georg Löfflmann, associate professor in war studies at the University of Warwick, the reform was a bombshell. “When Scholz made that speech to the Bundestag my jaw was on the floor,” he said. “With this half-hour speech he essentially uprooted several historically embedded assumptions about Germany’s place in the world that go back to the post-1945 political culture.”
The response was jubilant. Polls showed that up to 78 per cent of German voters supported the measure. The defence ministry was flooded with pitches from arms manufacturers rubbing their hands in anticipation of a bonanza of orders for new kit. One expert wrote a national newspaper article urging the government to plough its war chest into cutting-edge military technologies such as laser cannons and artificial intelligence-powered radar systems.
On closer inspection, however, these plans will deliver nothing like the revolution that all the hubbub might suggest. They are not primarily about expanding the Bundeswehr or equipping it with the weapons of the future; they are about repairing some of the damage done by 30 years of pacifism, parsimony and neglect.
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During the Cold War West Germany was the tip of Nato’s spear in Europe, with an army of 500,000, 12 divisions and nearly 5,000 battle tanks.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism, the visceral threat that had sustained this enormous military apparatus vanished almost overnight. Successive chancellors halved the defence budget. After all, why did Germany need to spend all that money when it was “surrounded by friends” and could finally enjoy its “peace dividend”?
This fiscal erosion was accompanied by a strategic shift. The Bundeswehr was chiefly tilted towards non-combat deployments overseas, providing training, reconnaissance and logistical support from the sidelines of western missions in places such as Mali, Syria and Afghanistan, rather than readiness for the possibility of a land war in Europe.
Since Germany was reunified in 1990 its armed forces have shed 63 per cent of their personnel and jets, 68 per cent of their warships and 94 per cent of their battle tanks. The navy has only six submarines at its disposal. Had the government maintained the defence budget at its 1991 level, it would have spent an extra €450 billion by now. This is the largest post-Cold War military spending gap in the West.
Much of the hardware that remains is so faulty or superannuated that it is only really available on paper. It is not uncommon for more than half of the submarines, warplanes and certain classes of fighting vehicle to be out of action at any given time. The CH-53G heavy transport helicopters have not been replaced since 1972. Nearly a third of the 2,700 Soviet-made Strela anti-aircraft rockets Germany recently sent Ukraine were unusable, having been stashed away in mouldy containers for the past eight years.
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The €100 billion may sound like a lot of money in the abstract, but set against this vast black hole it looks more like a bailout than an investment in significant new capabilities. Nor is it strictly speaking additional cash: it will be used to bolster the defence budget to the 2 per cent target over the next four years, raising questions about how future governments will be able to sustain this level of expenditure once the €100 billion sugar rush runs out.
Scholz’s government has not yet said how it plans to spend the money. However, Löfflmann has drawn up a “shopping list” based on the hardware Germany has already promised to buy or urgently needs, which seems likely to eat up the lion’s share of the funding.
This includes €20 billion that will have to be spent purely on restocking the Bundeswehr’s badly depleted stores of rockets, bullets and grenades. “If it got involved in serious fighting on the scale we’ve seen in Ukraine, the Bundeswehr would run out of ammunition within two or three days,” Löfflmann said.
Much of the rest will be sucked up by existing commitments to replace weapons systems that are already approaching the end of their viable lifespan, if not past it. In many cases the new kit will be an indisputable improvement on the old, but without doing anything fundamentally different in strategic terms.
The 80 elderly Tornado jets tasked with delivering US nuclear warheads in the event of an atomic war — the symbol of the “nuclear umbrella” America has spread over Europe — will be swapped for up to 35 F-35 fighters and 15 Eurofighters with advanced electronic warfare capabilities. Experts put the bill at €8 billion to €15 billion.
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Germany’s US-made Patriot batteries will be modernised at a cost of €1 billion to €2 billion and possibly exchanged in the long run for an as yet undeveloped surface-to-air missile system. The new transport helicopters will consume another €5 billion or so.
Another large dollop of cash, perhaps €4 billion, will have to be spent on the nine mechanised infantry battalions, whose 1970s-era Marder fighting vehicles have so far only partially been replaced with Pumas, which turned up in such poor condition that they had to be retrofitted to bring them up to Nato standards.
And so the list goes on, all the way down to mundane pieces of kit that are in desperately short supply, from night-vision goggles (€10,000 apiece) and oil tankers for the navy (there are only two left) to boots and warm clothing.
By the time Germany has ticked off all these items there may be precious little money left for buying the kind of hardware that would meaningfully change its strategic posture, though it is expected to plug certain gaps in its capabilities, such as mobile air defence systems and armed drones, which were previously taboo for Scholz’s Social Democratic Party.
Some experts question whether the notoriously chaotic military procurement agency in Koblenz can handle even these relatively limited upgrades. Nor are the Bundeswehr’s troop numbers, already limited by shortfalls in recruitment, likely to increase substantially.
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“They’re not suddenly going to wheel out the Terminator or anything like that,” Löfflmann said. “I don’t think we’re going to see a massive enhancement of what Germany can do. What we’re going to see is armed forces that can actually do what they’re supposed to do. This is about delivering on all the promises Germany had already made on paper but hadn’t fulfilled because it kept kicking the can down the road.”
The laser guns, it seems, will just have to wait.
