Current Problems of Germany’s Armed Forces
2019.12.31
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By Wilfried von Bredow
Big and complex organisations inevitably face various kinds of problems. The armed forces of Germany, known as the Bundeswehr, is certainly a big and complex organisation. After the end of the East-West conflict, the German government pursued a policy of reforming the Bundeswehr, which implied a quasi-permanent downsizing of both the budgets per year and the number of soldiers. The motive behind this policy was a mixture of necessities concerning the adaptation of the armed forces to the new (but somewhat unclear and confusing) strategic environment and of rather illusionary expectations of a ‘peace dividend’ and a less conflictual international system.
In 1985, the Bundeswehr was comprised of ca. 495,000 soldiers (about 45% having been drafted). Furthermore, ca. 180,000 civil employees were dealing with administrative and other non-military aspects of the organisation. In those days, the Bundeswehr was a comparatively strong conventional (=decidedly non-nuclear) part of NATO’s strategy of deterrence plus, if deterrence would fail, the determination to defend the territory of West Germany and the territories of its allies. The end of the East-West conflict nullified this strategic framework. Subsequently, the three decades after 1990 were characterized by various attempts to define new tasks and missions for the armed forces, in accordance with NATO and in prospect of an ever-growing political and military integration of the European Union. The various reform steps, transformations, and re-prioritizing developed into a painful crisis of confidence in and self-confidence of the Bundeswehr. Its current size is much smaller than at the end of the East-West-conflict: ca. 180,000 soldiers, including ca. 8,500 short-term volunteers. To break it down, ca. 61,000 soldiers serve in the Army, while ca. 28,000 are in the Air Force and ca. 16,000 in the Navy. The Medical Service of the Bundeswehr contains approximately 20,000 soldiers and the Joint Support Service about 27,500 soldiers. Since 2017, the so-called Cyber- and Information Room (CIR) exists as a separate organisation domain with nearly 13,000 soldiers at this point in time. Slightly more than 22,000 soldiers of all branches of the Bundeswehr are female. In addition, the number of civil employees of the armed forces has dropped to around 70,000.
The main problems of the Bundeswehr result from unclear concepts about its military doctrine and priorities, deficits with the procurement of arms and military equipment, from bureaucratic self-blockades, and from the rather unique legal basis of its military missions. A fourth problem arises from the also rather unique public reluctance to accept the armed forces as a legitimate instrument for the defence and assertion of the national interest. To avoid misunderstandings, the Bundeswehr and its soldiers are certainly highly esteemed by the majority of the German people. This general support includes a high rate of consent with all kinds of humanitarian and non-military missions. However, it does not extend to genuine military missions of the Bundeswehr. A case in point is the public reluctance to identify with the Bundeswehr mission as part of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan.
NATO and European Union
The Bundeswehr is firmly anchored in two alliances – NATO and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union. The problem is that these two multilateral alliances, despite all their institutional links, are based on different political interests and different military capacities. US-dominated NATO serves, first and foremost, American interests but is still regarded as an efficient protection shield for Europe against military pressures, e.g. by Russia. The European Union, on the other hand, is everything but a military union, and its many attempts to create a common defence and security policy and a common European army remain patchwork at best. Traditionally, German governments pursue a balancing act between these partly overlapping but often arduously reconcilable alliances. Over the last years, the Trump administration has not make things any easier.
On the domestic level, the Bundeswehr is deeply embedded in political structures that are intended to guarantee the primacy of civil politics. As such, every mission of the Bundeswehr out-of-area (beyond the territory of NATO) must be approved by the German Parliament. These staunch ties developed since the mid-1950s when the Bundeswehr was founded. Civil and democratic control of the armed forces is a positive achievement in Germany’s military history. Its downside, however, is a widespread conviction that Germany does not really need the military as an instrument of politics. Consequently, in view of security problems and military conflicts, the military strategic discourse in Germany is often weak and confused.
New Wine in Old Skins
Recently, some things have changed. The relatively small strategic community in Germany has tried to initiate a debate on a more active security and defense policy and on a more visible role of the armed forces. The speeches of Federal President Gauck, Foreign Minister Steinmeier, and Defense Minister von der Leyen at the Munich Security Conference in 2014 announced a farewell to the policy-guiding principle of ‘civil power’ without military teeth. This announcement was a clear signal, but it did not seem strong enough to bring about the necessary conceptual changes – despite many administrative attempts, some of which are documented in the White Paper of 2016 and in the new Conception of the Bundeswehr of 2018. Unfortunately, these documents remain mostly on the level of targets and advertisements. The style and dynamics of Germany’s security and defense policy did not really change. In addition, the Bundeswehr sunk into a swamp of combined crises.
The over-arching and most salient difficulty which strained the professional daily life of the Bundeswehr and its soldiers over the past ten, fifteen years and threatens to do so in the years ahead is centred around the deep-rooted structural problem of a paralysing bureaucracy. Its debilitating effects cripple the individual sense of responsibility and discourage creative and courageous initiatives by soldiers and civil employees.
Self-Perception and Military Tradition
Meanwhile, the inner-organizational atmosphere of the Bundeswehr appears to be overshadowed by a widespread feeling of uneasiness. This is the result of strong pressures from the ministry in Berlin which are intended to implement a ‘politically correct’ collective self-perception of the Bundeswehr soldiers and to cut off nearly all reminiscences of former German militaries. It is certainly necessary to keep the concept of (democratic) ‘citizen in uniform’ and the principles of ‘Innere Führung’ (internal leadership philosophy) alive and to adapt them to new social, political and military environments. However, to drastically cut professional ties to the military past is counterproductive and harms the self-esteem of soldiers. The professionalism (certainly not the political orientation) of the Wehrmacht enjoys a good reputation among soldiers of allied forces. When Bundeswehr contingents serve together with them (in international Headquarters or in stabilization missions like ISAF), they are often bewildered by their respect for Wehrmacht generals like Rommel and others.
The internal debates on these value-oriented issues seems to have developed into a kind of malaise. The ministry has strongly intervened in some of them, e.g. the fostering of some military traditions. These interventions may have been intended as an input for debate, but many soldiers regarded them as a kind of bureaucratic language rule.
Hardware Problems
This leads us back to the structural problem of bureaucracy in the military organisation. Most observers of the Bundeswehr agree that it lives through difficult times. A critical report about the manoeuvrability of the Bundeswehr recently concluded that there are not enough personnel and that the troops are far from being fully-equipped. Tanks, ships, and aircraft ready for deployment are a scarce resource. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces (Wehrbeauftragter) remarked in his recent report (January 2019), the actual availability of these arms systems is well below 50 %. Helicopters (, Tiger and CH-53) do not fly. Combat aircraft (Eurofighter and Tornado) are unable to leave the ground. The central weapon system of the army, the battle tank Leopard 2, spends more time in the repair garage than in the training area. In 2010, the Bundeswehr ordered 350 units of the infantry tank Puma. Nine years later, 176 of them have been delivered, yet only 48 of them are in functioning order.
A Tornado IDS fighter plane lands at Al-Asrak, Jordan, at Mission Counter Daesh (Source: Federal Ministry of Defence)
The navy struggles with particularly tough hardware problems: none of their submarines was fully operational in 2018, which means, among other things, that the submarine crews lack full training. When the first of four very expensive Frigates 125 was launched in 2014, it could not be deployed because of severe technical issues. It took another five years until it was capable of being put into service. There are, however, problems with the crew training for this highly complex vessel because the naval authorities failed to make provisions for the necessary training center. It will takeyears to repair this omission. The scandal surrounding the navy’s three-masted training ship Gorch Fock is not so significant in terms of military combat efficiency, but indeed very significant as an iconic status-symbol of the navy. The price tag for its overhaul rose from € 10 million (2015) to € 135 (2019).
The list of hardware problems of the Bundeswehr is much longer. The dangerously poor equipment used by soldiers was already obvious during the ISAF-mission of Bundeswehr contingents in northern parts of Afghanistan. Since more than a decade, the armament problems have been hotly discussed among military experts. In December 2013, Ursula von der Leyen became Defense Minister. She displayed determination and put forth very vigorous reform plans in order to overcome the unfortunate situation of the Bundeswehr. However, one of her first drastic actions to show strong leadership went completely wrong. She emphatically announced that the standard rifle of the Bundeswehr G 36 would have to be taken out of service due to reports that it did not function in a fail-safe manner. This assessment turned out be premature, and, after a lot of internal debates and some court proceedings with the manufacturing company, the G 36 was rehabilitated to a certain extent. Up until today, the Bundeswehr is not certain whether and when the soldiers will get another standard rifle.
Nearly six years after von der Leyen’s incumbency the poor condition of the hardware situation has become even more unfortunate. All attempts to master the difficulties, e. g. with the help of expensive consulting firms, backfired. Major weapon and equipment systems could not be repaired because the required spare parts were unavailable. Meanwhile, harsh critics continue to call the Bundeswehr a scrap heap (Schrotthaufen). A high-ranking German officer has been quoted as saying, “No matter where you look, there’s dysfunction”. Nevertheless, even if this and comparable statements are a bit too harsh, the general disappointment among Bundeswehr soldiers is immense. There is a wide gap between the ambitions of the government to present the Bundeswehr as a strong and reliable pillar of Germany’s as well as Europe’s security, on the one side, and the sad reality, on the other.
Negligence Syndrome
The military organization does not run smoothly. The best efforts of many officers and rank and file soldiers on the troop level are partly devaluated by structural shortcomings. This development is beyond reason when we rely on mono-causal explanations. Instead, we have to surmise a contradictory negligence syndrome with deep roots in the immediate post Cold War years. It is a syndrome because several negative factors come together and produce mutually reinforcing effects crucial to the performance of the armed forces. It is contradictory because security policy and its military muscles do play a growing role in international politics, especially on the European level.
Some important aspects of these negative factors are:
● the defective politico-strategic discourse about the purpose of the armed forces;
● the flawed and over-optimistic self-perception of their leadership;
● the strong pressure on critical voices that created a self-indulgent spirit of conformity among their leadership;
● bureaucratic petrification where fresh and experimental initiatives should be in demand;
● internal miscommunication and heaviness;
● the structurally weak position of the military in comparison with the representatives of the armament industry during procurement processes;
● financial mismanagement;
● missing cost-effectiveness strictness;
● the widespread resignation among the soldiers on the middle and lower levels of the hierarchy.
This negligence syndrome is kept alive bolstered by two contradictions: the first main contradiction involves proclamations by the political leadership for ambitions guidelines concerning the Bundeswehr and their failure to implement them. The most salient example for this attitude is the often-repeated pledge of the chancellor and the various defense ministers to increase the military budget to the NATO standard of 2 % of the GDP. This is a PR act and not much more (even if, indeed, the military budget is now rising and will reach approximately 1,35 % in 2019). To be clear about this point, the problem is not the money. The 2 % benchmark is certainly disputable. However, to repeat the determination to get there without really knowing how to get there destroys one’s credibility.
The second main contradiction is the lack of strategic priorities expressed by the illusion of a “European army” and the claim for leadership in European security policy. For the time being, neither the German government (not to mention the German public) nor the Bundeswehr are ready to tackle these targets.
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wilfried Freiherr von Bredow (ret.) was a professor of political science at the University of Marburg from 1972 to 2009. He was research fellow and guest professor at Oxford, Toronto, Saskatchewan, Toulouse, Lille and Chiayi, Taiwan. From 2011 to 2018, he was a Faculty Member of the Geneva Graduate School of Governance. Prof. von Bredow focuses on German foreign/security policy, military-society relations, transatlantic security policy and the international roles of Canada.