Introduction

Ten years from now, Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr will have been completely remodeled: it will be smaller, it will have a new internal organization, it will have acquired new equipment for global force projection, it will take on different military tasks, and it will (most likely) be a professional army. While the general consensus about this assessment is broad, there are differing ideas among Germany's political and military elite over the details of the remodeling. With the publication of the report by the Bundeswehr Reform Commission (official name: "Commission for a Common Security and the Future of the Bundeswehr") headed by former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker on May 23rd, Germany has entered a vivid discussion about the direction of the armed forces reform.

The Bundeswehr has already come a long way in the past ten years. By fully integrating the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), the German Democratic Republic's armed forces, into its ranks within less than two years, the "Defenders of the Federation" (which is the literal translation of "Bundeswehr") successfully completed one of the most difficult tasks of the German unification process. At the same time, the Bundeswehr had to adjust quickly to the new realities of the post-Cold War world. Starting with the Gulf War in 1990/91, the Bundeswehr was called upon to participate in peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions - and thus to significantly alter its constitutional assignment of national defense in a NATO framework. Today, Bundeswehr troops are an essential part of the international peace-keeping units stationed in Bosnia and Kosovo, benefiting from experience they gained while participating in United Nations missions to places like Cambodia, Somalia, and Indonesia in the 1990s.

But these new activities have brought the Bundeswehr close to its limits: militarily, technically, politically, and in terms of qualified manpower. Many experts even state that with more than 30,000 Bundeswehr troops stationed in the Balkans at various times, the " Truppe" (as Germany's armed forces refer to themselves) is already operating far beyond its capabilities - even on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, numerous problems have been increasingly difficult to conceal from public view over the past few years. When Gerhard Schröder's Social-Democrats (SPD) and Joschka Fischer's Greens formed a new governing coalition and took over from Helmut Kohl's CDU in October 1998, it was clear that the Bundeswehr needed quick answers to its pressing structural problems. Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping thus hurried to form a nineteen-member advisory commission, consisting of military experts, businessmen, former government officials, and representatives from civil organizations like the German Red Cross, to analyze the Bundeswehr's challenges and needs, and to make proposals for its reform.

The conclusion of the 179-page report by the Weizsäcker commission was blunt, but clear: "The way the Bundeswehr looks today, it is not capable to cope with the tasks it has to fulfill." Several other proposals for a reform of the armed forces have been made - most notably by General Hans-Peter von Kirchbach, the Bundeswehr's top soldier. This paper discusses some of the Bundeswehr's most pressing problems and presents the central features of the conflicting proposals for the armed forces reform.

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Pressing Problems

Outdated equipment, decreasing budgetary funding and a contested internal organization are among the Bundeswehr's most pressing problems.

Equipment. As it was originally designed originally in the 1950s, the Bundeswehr was to stop a massive ground attack from the Warsaw Pact forces. Therefore, it was equipped with heavy armory and tanks in order to fight a massive battle along Germany's long Eastern border. That design became obsolete with the change of the European security landscape after the end of the Cold War. However, most of Germany's armed forces still consist of the same vehicles and weapons as in the 1970s and 1980s, and are thus lacking most of the smaller, more flexible equipment needed for UN missions.

For example, when the Bundeswehr needs to move troops and equipment abroad, it frequently has to rent huge transporter planes from Russia or the U.S. because it only owns very few of its own heavy transporters, the "Transall" (which is, by the way, a thirty-year-old plane for which spare parts are no longer made). Similarly, the Bundeswehr's most frequently used armored vehicle, the "M 113" was constructed in the 1950s and has not been replaced ever since. Also, communications technology used by the Bundeswehr is not compatible with the standard systems used by most other NATO allies. When the German navy participates in joint exercises with its Alliance partners, German officers have to ask their partners not to use digital communications systems - because otherwise the Germans wouldn't be able to communicate at all. When German troops accompany a UN convoy through Kosovo, they have to stop if they want to communicate with their headquarter in order to set up a radio communicator dating back to the 1960s. Satellite based mobile communication is a very rare piece of equipment in the Bundeswehr.

Defense minister Scharping recently summed up the technical situation of Germany's armed forces by saying: "If there were convergence criteria for the creation of the common European security and defense policy like there were for European Monetary Union, Germany would have to stay outside of the club."

Funding. The original design of the Bundeswehr is only one reason for the inappropriate equipment of Germany's armed forces. The other one is insufficient funding. As U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen has pointed out regularly in the past, Germany's defense spending has dropped to 1.5 percent of its gross national product (GNP) - lower than any of NATO's nineteen member states except Luxembourg. With 3 percent of their GNP, France and Britain are spending twice as much. And the Schröder government still plans to cut another nine billion US-dollars in defense spending over the next four years.

Organization. On its inside, the 322,000 soldiers of the Bundeswehr face two structural challenges. On the one hand, there is the distinction between the "Hauptverteidigungskräfte" (HVK; "major defense forces") and the "Krisenreaktionskräfte" (KRK; "crisis reaction forces"). The KRK were created in the 1990s in order to form units especially prepared to participate in UN or NATO out-of-area missions. Frustration within the armed forces is growing because the 60,000-strong KRK receives the newer equipment and better funding whereas many members of the HVK feel as if they are no longer needed and wanted.

On the other hand, Germany is the last major European country with mandatory military service. The Bundeswehr's 130,000 conscripts now make up about 40 percent of the Bundeswehr's members, but conscripts cannot be forced to participate in UN or NATO missions (they can volunteer, though). Because they only serve for ten months, they usually don't have the necessary qualifications for out-of-area missions anyways (between 1989 and today, the duration of mandatory service has been reduced in three steps from fifteen to ten months). But that means that the professional officers have to participate in more missions than they would like to - and as the Bundeswehr doesn't fail to point out - than their families can support. There are simply to few experts for too many tasks. To many experts, the creation of an all-professional army would be the best answer to this problem. But others feel that mandatory service assures closer relations - and thus better democratic control - between the armed forced and the society.

Another, non-military problem makes outright abolition of conscription a difficult task: German men can opt between military service and spending a year doing social work - e.g. for the Red Cross, in community hospitals, in retirement homes, or in local environmental protection efforts. Over the years, social services have become more and more dependent on young German men to join for a limited time. If conscription would end tomorrow, parts of Germany's social system would simply collapse - and that's why groups like the Red Cross are vehemently opposing calls for an end to conscription.

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Conflicting Proposals, Scharping's Salomonic Solution and the Funding Question

The four key questions any Bundeswehr reform plan has to answer are the following: (1) How many soldiers is Germany's future army supposed to have? (2) How many are to be part of the "crisis reaction forces"? (3) Is the conscription system to be kept? (4) And if yes, how many conscripts are to serve in the Bundeswehr in the future? Over the past year, every major political player in Germany has proposed his own plan for the reform of the armed forces (see table 1 for an overview). An intense public discussion, however, only started when the Weizsäcker commission's report came out on May 23rd.

For a long time, Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping (SPD) himself had kept quiet about his own preferences. Many observers even criticized that Scharping had been hiding his cards for too long. After all, they argue, it was him who called on Weizsäcker and Kirchbach to lay out their respective proposals for an armed forces reform in order to start up a broad public discussion about the future shape and role of the Bundeswehr.

Instead, Scharping put question marks behind his own will to enter the discussion process openly. First, he fired Kirchbach only days after the general had published his reform proposals. Then, only hours after Weizsäcker presented his commission's report on May 23rd, Scharping announced that he would present his own plan in the cabinet meeting scheduled for June 14th. That plan was approved by the Cabinet after he reached an agreement with Finance Minister Eichel. In the end, Scharping's answers to the four central questions lie in the middle between the Weizsäcker and the Kirchbach proposals (see table 1 for details). The cabinet is now scheduled to vote on his reform plans on June 21st on the funding for this new plan.

There are still some questions regarding the funding of the reform. One argument for an armed forces reform has always been to make the Bundeswehr more "effective" and thus less costly. Scharping claims that the Bundeswehr can save at least one billion marks in the next four years by reorganizing and by cooperating with private companies. This money could then be used for the modernization of military equipment. But critics from the Greens estimate that the planned reorganization of the Bundeswehr may cost as much as four billion marks a year for several years. This would leave little to no room for the defense minister to spend money on new investments. However, Scharping reached an agreement with Finance Minister Eichel to integrate income from the sale of no-longer-needed Bundeswehr buildings and grounds into the Bundeswehr budget for new equipment, a projected 1.5 billion marks. While the Bundeswehr's funding will be reduced during the next two years from 45.3 billion marks to 43.7 billion marks, Eichel and Scharping agreed to hold the latter level beyond 2003.

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Table 1

Criticism of this plan in Germany remains fixed on the accusation that this approach will not allow Germany to increase its defense spending as a share of GDP toward meeting NATO commitments . Also, dealing with the more expensive procurement projects (transport aircraft) remains problematic within this plan. However, Scharping has managed to push through his reforms much faster than expected. After the budget vote, he will begin the process of implementing a significant reshaping of the Bundeswehr.