Germany: Where’s that promised military buildup?
It’s been a year since German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to completely overhaul the German armed forces, said Ben Knight in Deutsche Welle, but so far, “not much has happened.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a seismic event for Germany, knocking elites from all parties out of their complacency. Just three days after Russia attacked, Scholz gave a stirring speech calling the event a Zeitenwende, or epochal turning point, in German history. Promising that Germany would henceforth finally meet NATO’s yearly defense-spending goal of 2 percent of GDP, he said his government would also borrow $106 billion for a “massive, one-off” cash infusion to the military to make up for decades of underspending. A year on, though, inflation and interest payments on the loan have left only about half the sum available for actual hardware, and nothing has yet been purchased. The procurement process, already maddeningly inefficient, has been slowed further by greedy lawmakers pushing for military contracts in their regions. Perhaps a year “isn’t enough” for Scholz to turn around “the colossal ocean tanker” that is the bureaucracy of the German military.
When he made that speech, Scholz assumed that Ukraine would fall “and that the Russian army would be at the Polish border within days,” said Frank Specht in Handelsblatt. Instead, the Ukrainians stopped the Russian advance. So in the intervening year, rather than beefing up its own military, Germany shoveled weapons and equipment to Ukraine. We started gingerly at first, offering just helmets, but over the months we began sending selfpropelled howitzers, rocket launchers, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles, and, most recently, tanks. The result is that we have actually depleted our own armed forces. At this point, if Germany were suddenly attacked, we would “have to stop fighting after just a few days for lack of ammunition.”
The real progress has been made in transforming not our military, but our mindset, said Michael Herl in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Living for decades in the shadow of our violent past, and secure under the American defense umbrella, Germans thought “we had developed some kind of immunity” to war. We “called that miracle cure pacifism.” But Russia’s war has demonstrated that “simply not participating may not be enough.” Now, even former conscientious objectors are feeling a new kind of patriotism, realizing that the idea of Germany “isn’t just a reason to get drunk every four years” at the World Cup, but something worth actually fighting for.
Germany has certainly changed its rhetoric, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial, but we haven’t seen enough yet to know whether it will actually start punching at its weight. Scholz did wean his country off dependence on Russian gas, and “that’s quite a feat.” But will he take responsibility for defending NATO’s eastern flank? And what about EU defense policy—will Germany finally become the partner France needs? Scholz did well to acknowledge the historical turning point last year. But he has yet to “live up to the expectations he raised.”