the Bundeswehr — the equivalent of the
armed forces and Ministry of Defence com-
bined — as a ‘bureaucratic monster’, citing
the example of the commander of a tac-
tical air wing with 1,500 military and non-
military staff and flying assets totalling
€3 billion under his command — and yet
who was trusted to spend only €250 a year
without getting approval from above.
Not that centralisation of funding has
helped promote carefulness with money.
One of the scandals laid at von der Leyen’s
door is that of the Gorch Fock, a naval train-
ing ship which was sent for an overhaul in
2016 and which has yet to be returned to its
duties. Meanwhile, the arc of estimated costs
will be familiar to anyone who follows Brit-
ish public sector projects — it has risen from
€10 million to €135 million.
What von der Leyen has done is increase
the military budget, which rose sharply
last year from €38.5 billion to €43.5 billion.
A further €3 billion a year is planned by
- But even at that level, Germany will
fall well short of its obligation as a Nato
member to spend 2 per cent of GDP per
year on defence — it will merely take its
spending from 1.2 per cent to 1.5 per cent.
True, few of Nato’s European member states
fulfil this obligation, but of all of them you
might expect the continent’s largest econo-
my to be setting an example. Since the end
of the Cold War, Germany has found it all
too easy to exempt itself, or play only a token
part, in joint military operations around the
world — its aggressive past serving as a
convenient excuse, as if it is telling the world:
now, you wouldn’t want a Germany which
was flexing its military muscles, would you?
Spending money is one thing; spending
it well is another. The German military has
never really made a successful transforma-
tion from a conscript force to a smaller pro-
fessional force. Conscription was suspended
in 2011, two years before von der Leyen’s
arrival as defence minister. But several times
since then the government has toyed with
the idea of reviving it — more for social endsthan military ones. Germany’s armed forces
are of a similar size to Britain’s — 173,
personnel compared with our 155,000. Yet
not all are being kept in adequate training.
In 2017, 19 out of 129 helicopter pilots lost
their licenses because they were unable to
meet the required number of flying hours.
There is a question of how committed
von Leyen has been to maintaining an inde-
pendent German defence force. In 2014,
she told Der Spiegel that a single joint EU
defence force ‘would be a logical conse-
quence of an increasingly close military
cooperation in Europe’ — an idea which
appals even staunch British europhiles such
as Vince Cable. Since being proposed as
Commission president, von der Leyen has
retreated on that idea — perhaps aware that
her record of running the German military
will not inspire confidence.
In 1945, the US military sent a team to
Germany with the aim of capturing Albert
Speer before the military police did — they
were so impressed by the ability of the
Nazis’ armaments machine to recover from
bombing raids that they were desperate to
debrief him. We may no longer be at risk of
Germany putting its military to aggressive
use. But there is little sign that it has the
organisation and competence to fulfil its
role as a Nato member, let alone form the
heart of a European defence force.‘I’m in textiles.’Claim a FREE TICKET when you subscribe to The Spectator for just £1 a week. Go to http://www.spectator.co.uk/PMTuesday 17 September 2019, 7 p.m.
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