A losing battle
Germany’s once-fearsome military has become a joke
ROSS CLARK
exercises have been reduced to a laughing
stock. In 2014, a battalion on a Nato exer-
cise in Norway was forced to use a paint-
ed broomstick to simulate a gun because it
didn’t have a real one. Nearly half the sol-
diers involved in the exercise could not be
issued with pistols.
Things were no better this year when
Germany took control of Nato’s Very High
Readiness Joint Task Force, charged with
combatting the threat from Russia. Germany
promised to have 44 Leopard 2 tanks and
14 Marder armoured infantry vehicles avail-
able for the task, yet in the event could only
muster nine and three respectively. A leaked
document revealed that the Luftwaffe’s
Eurofighter and Tornado fighter jets, alongwith its transport helicopters, are only avail-
able for use for an average of four months
per year — spending the rest of the time laid
up for maintenance and repair.
As for the F-125 Baden-Württemberg
frigates which were supposed to be coming
into service two years ago, the navy refused
to commission them. They failed their sea
trials after problems with radar, the flame-
proof coating on the fuel tanks and the cen-
tral computer system. Nor did the frigates
have any torpedo tubes or sonar — essential
for tackling the threat from submarines.
Last year’s annual report by the Parlia-
mentary Armed Forces Commissioner —
the German equivalent of a defence select
committee report — confirmed the inability
of the military to keep its equipment in use,
adding that for a period from October 2017,
when a Type 212A submarine damaged its
rudder, none of the country’s six submarines
were available for use.
This year, the government overcame
the embarrassment by making informa-
tion on the availability of equipment
classified, so that it was left out of the
report. The Commissioner, Dr Hans-Peter
Bartels, was not impressed. He describedI
t is not hard to think of times when
German military weakness would have
been lauded as good news across the
rest of Europe, but perhaps not when the
German minister accused of running her
country’s armed forces into the ground has
just been named as the next president of the
European Commission.
The most recent embarrassment for the
Bundeswehr — the grounding of all 53 of its
Tiger helicopters this month due to techni-
cal faults — is just the latest in a long series
of humiliations to have sprung from Ursula
von der Leyen’s spell as defence minister. A
country once feared for its ruthless military
efficiency has become a joke among Euro-
pean powers.
If von der Leyen can be transposed on to
the British political scene she might be seen
as a teutonic Chris Grayling — attacked
from all sides, not least her own, for her
chronic mishandling of her brief. To quote
fellow Christian Democrat Rupert Scholz,
who served as Helmut Kohl’s defence
minister: ‘The Bundeswehr’s condition is
catastrophic. The entire defence capability
of the federal republic is suffering.’
It is not fair to blame all the problems
of the German military on von der Leyen,
who has been defence minister only since- For understandable reasons, the Ger-
man military was a little constrained in its
development between 1945 and 1990, when
defence was in any case effectively con-
tracted out to foreign powers. Even now
Germany remains bound by military con-
straints — under the Treaty for the Final
Settlement with Respect to Germany, which
returned the country’s sovereignty in 1991,
German armed forces are limited to 370,
personnel, of whom no more than 345,
are allowed to be in the army and air force.
It cannot have nuclear weapons. After the
Cold War, German governments of all col-
ours did not consider defence a priority —
unwilling to see that Russia could ever rise
again as a threat.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t excuse some of
the inadequacies of the military which have
come to light under von der Leyen’s lead-
ership. Under her watch, German military
‘The Bundeswehr’s condition is
catastrophic. The federal republic’s
entire defence capability is suffering’The EU is
demanding that, in return for a new deal,
the UK must come up with a solution to
the Irish backstop problem. But since the
UK will happily leave with no deal, the
EU will have to find a solution anyway.
Let the Romans help out.
Latin foedus (cf. ‘federal’) meant
a treaty that guaranteed peace and
friendship between Rome and another
state, in perpetuity. There were two
standard models. A foedus aequum
(‘equal’) put both parties on an equal
footing. The first we hear of between
Rome and the local cities of Latium
agreed eternal peace, mutual assistance
against enemies, equal sharing of spoils
and speedy settlements of commercial
disputes. Here both parties wanted
exactly the same outcome.
A foedus iniquum (‘unequal’),
struck when an enemy had been
defeated, compelled the second party to
acknowledge Rome’s sovereignty and
to provide military forces on demand.
Here a winner imposed conditions on
a loser. This is how the EU is currently
acting: you come up with a backstop
solution we like, or else.
But there is another way,
demonstrated by a peace-time treaty
struck between Rome and Carthage in
507 bc, designed to reconcile conflicting
interests (well before the devastating
Punic Wars between the two states). It
was needed because, two years earlier,
Rome had become an independent
republic by driving out its Etruscan king.
This set alarm bells ringing in Carthage,
a powerful North African trading nation
which already controlled Sicily, because
it had extensive commercial links with
the Etruscans to the north and south of
Rome. So the new balance of power had
to be addressed. For Rome it was vital to
assert that Rome, not the Etruscans, now
controlled Latium; the treaty warned
Carthage off interfering in any Latin city.
Carthage likewise needed to protect its
commercial interests against any Roman
ambition to interfere; so the treaty
controlled Rome’s access to the African
coast and Sicily. Here, then, two sides met
to create a treaty out of different needs.
The EU and the UK also have
conflicting reasons for wanting the
backstop problem solved. So chuck the
schoolboy games-playing and team up
like Rome and Carthage to solve it.
— Peter JonesANCIENT AND MODERN
Striking a deal, Roman-style