Yet even the country’s soft power is open to question, judging from the fact that the armed forces lack basic soft power equipment such as the heavy transport aircraft to transport humanitarian relief supplies and accommodation units. The caveats were also about Germany’s reluctance to embrace any kind of hard power. While it has joined NATO missions in Afghanistan and EU missions, the armed forces were subject to many caveats that placed restrictions on their movements. Ever since the end of World War II, Germany has adopted a non-militarist foreign policy. Then there is the issue of political culture. Bartels’s report refers to very high maintenance costs but also the lack of focus on priorities and inadequate leadership. Even though it’s well short of NATO’s 2 percent goal, the fact that the country spends so much money must say something about how that budget is allocated. That’s about 1.2 percent of gross domestic product. After all, Germany spent €37 billion on defense in 2017. One easy explanation is that the Bundeswehr has been subject to stringent cuts over the past two decades. There are any number of reasons behind the poor state of Germany’s armed forces. That same year, at one stage during a NATO exercise, because they lacked machine guns, tank commanders instead used broomsticks. It also raises many questions about Germany’s commitment to pull its weight in NATO and EU missions, as if the defense ministry wasn’t aware of these shortcomings.īack in 2014, a year after Ursula von der Leyen became defense minister, the armed forces were lacking such essential equipment that the aircraft that was supposed to take 150 German soldiers home from Afghanistan broke down. This sorry state of affairs is actually a recurrent one that raises serious problems about the ability of the Bundeswehr to modernize the armed forces. Just to add to the miserable state of the armed forces, the troops lack night-vision equipment and automatic grenade launchers. And by the way, there’s a shortage of spare parts for maintenance. There’s only three to hand.Īs for the Eurofighter and Tornado fighter jets and the CH-53 transport helicopters, they can only be used on average four months a year. Forget about having fourteen Marder armored infantry vehicles. Just to add to this catalogue of woes, the Bundeswehr has only nine operational Leopard 2 tanks, well short of the 44 needed for the VJTF. At times, not one of the fourteen Airbus A-400M could fly,” he added, referring to aircraft specifically designed to transport troops and military equipment. “At the end of the year, six out of six submarines were not in use. “The army’s readiness to deploy has not improved in recent years but instead has got even worse,” Bartels said. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to a report recently published by Hans-Peter Bartels, the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces. The Bundeswehr promised to make over 10,000 available. They don’t even have enough mobile accommodation units for the VJTF. This is because Germany’s armed forces are in such bad shape that its soldiers lack basic equipment such as protective vests and winter clothing. Under German command, which takes over the force in 2019, that’s certainly not going to happen. The aim is to mobilize some of the forces within 48 hours. Speed is supposed to be one of its big advantages. Not only is the force based on deterrence. The VJTF is a 5,000 strong force set up by NATO in 2014 to bolster the defenses of the Baltic States in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea.
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