Old reflexes are stirring all over Europe. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the Bundestag last year that Germany must maintain the strongest conventional military in Europe and backed that promise with a larger defense budget than any of the country’s neighbors could afford, concerns about Germany’s military power began to haunt Europe once again.
Behind closed doors, some French and Polish officials are asking whether a re-armed Germany is resolving Europe’s dependence on the United States—or simply replacing one hegemon with another. Some wonder whether European NATO members are moving toward a truly integrated defense of their continent—or simply a return to adversarial national armies now that the United States is no longer leading.
The reflex against a revived Germany, however, is as industrial as it is strategic. In June, Berlin pulled out of a Franco-German-Spanish plan to build a new fighter jet—in part because Germany would no longer allow a French company to claim a large share of the work—and scrapped a major contract with a Dutch-led consortium for frigates, ordering new ones from a German defense contractor instead. As a result, the two largest defense contracts in Europe are now flowing to German industry on German terms. Some of the irony about a remilitarized Germany is actually about France losing Germany’s pots of money and strategic honor that it took so long regardless.
The unease about Germany going it alone is as old as the Bundeswehr itself: In 1955, West Germany was allowed to wrap itself back into the corset of the alliance precisely so that German power no longer stood alone. Hundreds of thousands of allied American, British and French occupation forces remained on German soil for decades to enforce the terms.
But those who worry about a powerful Germany going it alone need to face an uncomfortable reality: NATO needs a strong German military backed by the continent’s largest economy and deep financial pockets. Parallel to this is that only Germany is capable of taking the place of the United States as the military backbone and unifier of the bloc. But today, the Bundeswehr is far from strong enough to fulfill that role. The paradox is that in order to strengthen Europe’s collective defense and act as a nexus around which other countries’ armies can eventually connect, Germany’s military needs to be independent first—and less integrated into the alliance than it is now. In a way, it is in the common interest of Europe for Germany to secede.
That’s because the current composition of NATO’s global forces is a relic of Europe’s post-Cold War peacetime. They are not suitable for a high power, 21st century war with Russia. Europe’s NATO forces are already burdened by fragmented structures, national caves, and heavy chains of command—and the way they have been assembled into international forces is a product of domestic unity diplomacy in peacetime, not a laser focus on effectiveness in war. With the United States withdrawing as a NATO ally and enabling technology, the disadvantages of the current structure of the alliance will increase.
The Bundeswehr must achieve cohesion as a fighting force. Coalition warfare in the style of post-Cold War NATO expeditions to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Libya — with confused chains of command, national caves, and separate rules for each flag — is ill-suited to a 21st-century war against Russia, where the tempo of operations will not wait for the coalition to reconcile its views.
Above all, the Bundeswehr needs to force changes at the NATO military level. The alliance has roughly nine European multinational force headquarters, each of which can command up to 60,000 troops on paper. Each of these corps is led by one or more “system nations” and assigned a different geographic location, including several corps on the northeast flank of the camp. At the corpse level, there are ground commands to balance multiple corpses and adjust wartime roles in advance.
The demand for these instruments is changing rapidly. A possible NATO-Russia war could be fought with a level of efficiency and power that NATO has forgotten since the end of the Cold War. What? Can NATO’s current international forces and divisions maintain cohesion in such an environment? They have never been tested in combat to such an extent. Yet that is how NATO envisions the coming struggle.
Moreover, the NATO corps is a paper tiger. Instead of having fully equipped formations, they are essentially headquarters waiting to mobilize, integrate, and command weapons, air defense, and large strike assets that, for the most part, lack the required volume.
NATO needs to fundamentally change the way its corps is built, and a Bundeswehr focusing more than it currently does on its national capabilities is central to that change.
First, each NATO force needs to have its own arsenal of weapons and other equipment provided by the leading corps nation. These include military weapons, precision fire, air defense, logistics, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance provided by the nation’s leading corps. That looks very different today. For example, the German-Dutch 1st Army has headquarters but—unlike the fully equipped U.S. army—no permanent army-grade weapons, air defense, or intelligence. In case of war, many of these and other capabilities will have to be produced and tied to the corps from the Bundeswehr, the Royal Netherlands Army, and the militaries of more than a dozen other nations during a sudden mobilization. Standing at headquarters is the easy part. Generating real capabilities by achieving performance—beyond the plan to integrate them only after a motivational decision—is the most difficult.
Maybe Germany should take Poland as an example. NATO’s International Army in the North East, which Poland anchors along with Germany and Denmark, has no assets other than the German-Dutch one. But it is on top of the rapidly expanding Polish national force with multiple weapons, long-range fire, and soon Apache attack helicopters. Centered around a single strong national command, a Polish-led force could end up with easier access to army-level military power than Germany’s assembled from multinational contributions.
Second, to maintain cohesion as a fighting force, a force needs a national headquarters to which allied units are subordinate. Only a military command directly commanding all of its full-spectrum capabilities can have immediate, unconditional, and fully integrated access to those capabilities. Under NATO’s national plan today, that capability is contributed by allied nations who retain national command authority, enforce their own precautions, and can block or remove their assets. This means that every task and decision you aim at risks vetoing one capital or another.
The union record shows what is happening under the current arrangement. When Germany backed out of the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, it withdrew its personnel from the coalition’s jointly operated AWACS fleet within days. Thus, an important common asset was left unattended by the political choice of one capital, even as Berlin pulled back NATO’s AWACS personnel in Afghanistan to soften the blow. During the war in Afghanistan, authorization loops back to European capitals frequently delayed operations, with the Bundeswehr among the most restricted operations.
Some would argue that such caveats and conflicts would largely dissolve in a Russian attack on NATO. Maybe. But a defense built on the hope that national politics will suddenly disappear under fire is a dangerous gamble. Therefore, if Berlin is serious about strengthening European defense and deterrence, it needs to change its own complicated decision-making process and pressure others to get rid of national caves, too.
None of this means that individual allied units cannot be folded into corps led by Germany or another nation. Dutch brigades, for example, are already serving within a German division, a Czech brigade is associated with the German 10th Armored Division, and a Romanian brigade is assigned to the German Rapid Forces Division.
Third, to be an effective combat force, a force needs authority over its units, regardless of their nationality, long before firing begins. The relationship today is largely on paper and remains anecdotal in reality: Allied units assigned to the Germans, for example, regularly train with them but remain largely confined to home. Solidarity is built during peace or not. The shared training, common terminology, and mutual trust among personnel that enable orders to move down the wartime chain cannot be improved after the shooting begins.
The Dutch 43rd Mechanized Regiment, which trains, organizes, and supplies as an organic part of the German 1st Panzer Division, shows what proper cooperation looks like; unfortunately, this model has not been widely replicated. What is needed is a year-long training exercise for national leadership levels under the national leadership chain. And it must be done in the field, and not in the narrative of a command post. Corps-level direct operations, which were largely abandoned after the Cold War, are where the corps of the NATO system becomes real or exposed as paper tigers. Tablet exercises are not enough.
If Berlin really wants to be the initiator and coordinator of European deterrence and defense, its military needs to be more national. A Germany that can lead a complete force under wartime conditions is a Germany that all of Europe can unite. But that requires the command architecture, doctrine, and war assets to be owned by the Germans and unconditionally available to the commander fighting an aggressor in the 21st century. Once you understand your old assumptions about German capabilities, this is good news for prevention. Ultimately we need to think of NATO as a wartime alliance, not a peacetime alliance management tool.
