Our German Ally: Tanking

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, December 31, 2022

 

From Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

 

Jack: I have lost both my parents.

 

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

 

From the Financial Times (December 19):

 

Germany sought to reassure Nato that it could still be relied on to lead the alliance’s rapid response task force even after all 18 of its most advanced armoured vehicles malfunctioned in a training exercise earlier this month.

 

All of them?

 

Putin has given any number of reasons (all of them nonsense) to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of them was that Russia was “threatened” by NATO’s expansion. That is, to put it mildly, unconvincing. Russia’s grumbling about Ukrainian independence dates back to the Yeltsin era, long before (the special case of the vanished East Germany aside) NATO had expanded to include any countries in the former Soviet bloc.

 

A more convincing explanation (so far as the Kremlin’s attitude to NATO was concerned) was that Putin had seen the alliance’s weakness and concluded that it would present Moscow with no problems in the event that Russia took back control over its neighbor. An important reason why the Kremlin might have seen things that way was the position of Germany, a supposedly key member of NATO, but one that had a distinctly, uh, nuanced view of what membership of the alliance meant.

 

One obvious sign of that was the country’s neglect of its armed forces throughout Angela Merkel’s dismal chancellorship.

 

Back in 2015, I quoted an extract from this story from the Washington Post:

 

The German army has faced a shortage of equipment for years, but the situation has recently become so precarious that some soldiers took matters into their own hands.

 

On Tuesday, German broadcaster ARD revealed that German soldiers tried to hide the lack of arms by replacing heavy machine guns with broomsticks during a NATO exercise last year. After painting the wooden sticks black, the German soldiers swiftly attached them to the top of armored vehicles, according to a confidential army report which was leaked to ARD . . .

 

To make matters worse, the broom-equipped German soldiers belong to a crucial, joint NATO task force and would be the first to be deployed in case of an attack. Opposition politicians have expressed concerns about Germany’s ability to defend itself and other European allies, given that even some of the most elite forces lack basic equipment.

 

As I wrote in 2015:

 

There was a time when the notion of the German army sweeping its way through Europe was rather less literal.