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Longhurst, Germany and the use of force.qxd 30/06/2004 16:25 Page 98 5 Redesigning the Bundeswehr? Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the Bundeswehr has faced, and mastered, a series of singular situations: unexpected reunification of East and West Germany; the imperative to absorb the East German People’s Army (NVA); and the calls for German out-of-area deployments in crisis areas. Yet, despite successfully responding to all of these challenges, the Bundeswehr has still to master another formidable obstacle: reforming itself.1 The enlargement of the Bundeswehr’s remit to embrace a far wider set of security tasks in the 1990s called for a realignment of its structures and capacities. At the forefront of this project, at least in the early 1990s, was a need to modernise the Bundeswehr, to create a deploy- ment capability based on rapid reaction for low-intensity peacekeeping. In time, and especially after the war in Kosovo of 1999 and renewed efforts at the EU level to create an effective military dimension (ESDP) to boost the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), expecta- tions and pressures for swifter and more far-reaching reforms emerged, with many of Germany’s allies and partners eager to see a greater com- mitment to modernise the Bundeswehr as well as increase defence spending. Stimulus for change was then provided by the events of September 11 2001 and the subsequent US-led war on terrorism, which served to finally explode the longstanding assumption that national and alliance territorial defence was central to the Bundeswehr’s mission and rationale. Certainly, the Bundeswehr at the start of the twenty-first century is a very different entity from that of the Cold War era. Reflecting the developments discussed in chapters 3 and 4, the process of defence reform in Germany over the past decade has been remarkable. How- ever, as this chapter shows, all efforts at reforming the Bundeswehr, to Kerry Longhurst - 9781526137401 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 02:12:54AM via free access Longhurst, Germany and the use of force.qxd 30/06/2004 16:25 Page 99 Redesigning the Bundeswehr? 99 make it more suited to contemporary security challenges, have been characterised by controversy and hampered by financial uncertainties. As a consequence, a considerable inconsistency emerged between Germany’s stated security policy goals and the growing willingness to use armed force, on the one hand, and the Bundeswehr’s physical and materiel capability to respond effectively. This chapter considers the numerous phases and highlights key developments in the Bun- deswehr’s transformation since the ending of the Cold War, starting with the reduction of the forces’ overall size and moving on to the sub- sequent reviews and measures adopted to improve the effectiveness and deployability of the Bundeswehr. Phase 1 (1990–97): a new role for a streamlined Bundeswehr The most immediate sources of change impacting upon the design of the Bundeswehr came from external impetuses at the end of the Cold War. Specifically, the strictures of the Two + Four Treaty’s framework and the size limitations of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty both enforced an upper limit of 370,000 on the Bundeswehr by 1994. Furthermore, the process of absorping parts of the former East German armed force, together with the demise of NATO’s forward defence strategy, presented a new set of coordinates within which to redesign the unified Germany’s post-Cold War armed forces. New thinking about the design of the armed forces, above and beyond the question of overall size, began to emerge thereafter as part of the nascent debate in Germany about the kind of security actor the new Germany should be, especially against the background of the Gulf War. Bringing this new thinking into focus was the so-called ‘Stoltenberg Paper’, drafted in February 1992 by Defence Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, officially called Militärpolitische und Militärstrate- gische Grundlagen und Konzeptionelle Grundrichtung der Neugestaltung der Bundeswehr (The Reform of the Bundeswehr: Conceptual Framework for Military Policy and Strategy). This document challenged the exist- ing tenets of (West) German security policy, conceiving as of ‘vital’ interest to Germany any conflict in the world, but especially in the Middle East or North Africa, and in global trade and access to resources. Unsurprisingly, the paper met with expressions of disquiet and was seen by many to herald a dangerous new era of Germany ‘going it alone’.2 Such thinking was clearly too much too soon, bearing in mind the Kerry Longhurst - 9781526137401 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 02:12:54AM via free access Longhurst, Germany and the use of force.qxd 30/06/2004 16:25 Page 100 100 Germany and the use of force highly contested and at this stage far from certain notion of an extended remit for the Bundeswehr, as chapter 3 indicated. The Verteidigungspolitische Richtlinien (Defence Policy Guidelines; hereafter VPR) of November 1992 represented the most cohesive pol- icy document thus far. Though in substance much the same as the Stoltenberg Paper, Volker Rühe’s VPR managed to present its pro- gramme and the enlargement of German security interests in a more palatable form. The VPR’s programme was premissed on the assump- tion that Germany was ‘no longer exposed to a direct military threat involving an offensive war in Europe’.3 Subsequently, ten vital security interests were identified, including: • the prevention, containment and resolution of crises and low-inten- sity conflicts; • the active maintenance of nuclear and naval powers of the transat- lantic alliance; • the continuation of European integration and the development of a European defence identity, a continued partnership as equals with the US and the maintenance of the US military presence in Europe; • the consolidation of democratic, economic and social progress in Europe; • the maintenance of free world trade and unhindered access to raw materials in the framework of a just world economic system; and • a continued commitment to progress in arms’ control processes for stability in and for Europe. In the Defence White Paper of 1994, published after the Constitu- tional Court’s decision (July 1994) on the legality of out-of-area deployments, the Bundeswehr’s mission was defined as contributing to ‘multinational NATO and WEU crisis-management activities, together with the capability to participate in an appropriate manner in opera- tions conducted under the auspices of the UN and the CSCE on the basis of the Charter of the UN and the Basic Law’,4 alongside the exist- ing ‘capability to build and employ defensive forces adequately to deal with what is at present an unlikely contingency, but at the same time the worst-case scenario, namely having to defend Germany and the Alliance’.5 By broadening the scope of German security interests, con- ceiving of a new role for the Bundeswehr and facilitating a wider range of deployments, these review documents and policy directives laid the basis for a series of defence reforms, which honed in on the need to Kerry Longhurst - 9781526137401 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 02:12:54AM via free access Longhurst, Germany and the use of force.qxd 30/06/2004 16:25 Page 101 Redesigning the Bundeswehr? 101 streamline the Bundeswehr and prepare it for a wider set of missions. Two main issues were addressed at this stage: the control of the armed forces and their structure. Since its inception, the Federal armed forces had been devoid of a national command and control structure. Moreover, on the basis of the Blankenese Erlass, the generalinspekteur – the highest ranking Bun- deswehr soldier – was never part of the chain of command between the civilian defence minister and individual inspekteuren of the three services, in peace and war. However, in the context of Germany’s greater engagement in peacekeeping missions, the VPR of March 1992 saw that some form of national operational command body spanning all three services would be required to facilitate the effective delivery of Germany’s crisis-management activities.6 A tangible result of these demands was the establishment of the German Army Operational Com- mand in August 1994, which came into force in January 1995 7 and unified the command structure for all three services in peacetime oper- ations, being independent of but parallel to NATO multinational structures. The enhanced the role of the generalinspekteur, again justi- fied as aiding the smooth running of operations, was enacted, propelling the generalinspekteur into the chain of operational com- mand in ‘peacetime only’. This implied that in peacetime operations – meaning all operations outside of the defence of German and/or NATO territory (i.e. out-of-area operations) – the generalinspekteur became part of the chain of command between the defence minister and the three service inspekteuren. Further enhancing the generalinspekteur’s position a führungszentrum of around sixty-five staff was assigned to him in early 1995.8 Step-change in Bundeswehr force structure was prompted first by NATO’s London Declaration of 1990, which heralded the move away from forward defence. Reacting to this, already in 1991, Generalin- spekteur Klaus Naumann outlined what change in the European security environment meant for the Bundeswehr. In addition to the usual protection of German citizens, he stressed that to remain credi- ble within the alliance an enhanced readiness to partake in collective actions to preserve peace within the framework of the UN Charter would have to be realised. This, he said, would require a re-orienta- tion of the Bundeswehr to include also verfügbar (rapid reaction) forces. Again it was Volker Rühe’s VPR which provided a greater focus to these ideas by delineating force structure into rapid reaction, main defence and basic infrastructure–augmentation forces.