Defense policy of the parties: disarm, armament, dissolve?

More money for the Bundeswehr? An end to all foreign assignments? Dissolve NATO? When it comes to defense policy, the parties are sometimes far apart. This could lead to conflict after the election.

Visit to the Lehnin military training area in Brandenburg. The first company of Logistics Battalion 172 practices on the shooting ranges. They are soldiers with G-36 rifles, there is sharp shooting. You have to watch for a few minutes to realize that this is the same Bundeswehr for which the Ministry of Defense likes to use the image of corona or flood helpers.

Defending the security of the country with violence, if necessary, is apparently an assignment that is not too popular, at least if you judge from the advertising clips for the Bundeswehr. During the evacuation campaign in Afghanistan, soldiers were once again seen on television getting out of the aircraft with weapons on their bodies, but the mere fact that something like this was noticed shows that the relationship between the Germans and their army seems anything but easy.

In general, Afghanistan: Many officers, candidates and crew ranks consider foreign deployments to be a matter of course, even after the debacle of the operation in the Hindu Kush. You have to expect to be assigned to it yourself, is the tenor. Many add that Germany must take on “responsibility in the world”, a phrase that Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer also likes to use.

AfD wants to do without foreign missions completely

One would think that a party like the AfD, which likes to uphold conservative values, would also subscribe to such a sentence. But it doesn’t. In terms of content, the party has long been alienating military alliances such as NATO, which is having an impact. After Kabul 2021 at the latest, it will be clear that one would like to forego foreign assignments entirely.

“We are defending Germany on the soil of the Federal Republic,” says Rüdiger Lucassen, defense policy spokesman for the AfD in the Bundestag. “The armed forces should only be used for national defense.” Lucassen, himself a retired colonel, quickly adds “and for the defense of the alliance within the framework of Article 5 of the NATO treaty.”

He does not mention that the operation in Afghanistan, which Lucassen and his party have sharply criticized, began with just such an alliance commitment, since the US sought assistance from Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Either the AfD considers a renewed alliance to be unlikely or, in case of doubt, they would still speak out against NATO, which cannot be ruled out.

Left party against everything military

Tobias Pflüger from the Left Party has it easier: his party is, to put it simply, against everything military in principle: no armament, no foreign missions and of course no NATO at all. “NATO stands for nuclear weapons operations and NATO stands for operations such as Afghanistan, so it is clear that this NATO cannot be the basis for our security policy,” he says. The Left Party’s vision is, he says again, a world without weapons and military alliances.

The party itself describes this attitude as a “consistent peace policy”, the majority of German politics regards this as a pure illusion. Should the Left Party want to co-rule in Germany, this stance would be a major obstacle to any coalition negotiations. “No foreign missions”, “fewer Bundeswehr” and “a dissolution of NATO” are positions that are difficult to accept for any possible coalition partner.

Greens link operations to a UN mandate

The fact that Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen also strived for radical pacifist goals in their founding phase is little felt in the current program. Little can be found of the contrary argumentation with which the party defended its first mission in Afghanistan in 2001 as a junior partner of the red-green Schröder government. Basically you need an order from the UN for missions abroad, is the party’s line.

“Foreign missions should take place if the United Nations gives a mandate for it and if you can of course achieve political goals with this mandate,” says Tobias Lindner, defense policy spokesman for the Greens. And he expressly points out again what a “networked approach” means: that is, the idea that the military can only set a framework within which diplomacy then has to work. This idea was similar in the coalition agreement of the current grand coalition. It does not seem to have worked properly, at least not in the way the Union and the SPD have interpreted it.

CDU is committed to NATO’s two percent target

The CDU speaks of itself as a “party of the Bundeswehr” and promises what soldiers will also like to hear: more money. “For the CDU it seems necessary to continue to increase the defense budget in order to achieve a better modernization of the troops and to obtain a better infrastructure,” says Henning Otte, the defense policy spokesman for the Union.

He speaks of the “full equipment of the Bundeswehr”. This and the defense policy goal of the Union could be very expensive: The Federal Republic would spend more than 70 billion euros on defense if the NATO goal of spending two percent of the gross domestic product on the defense budget is to be achieved. The Union has set this goal in its program.

Lots of ifs and buts at the SPD

The SPD sees these huge sums in conflict with other tasks such as climate protection and social equality and formulates it much more cautiously. Siemtje Möller, the defense policy spokeswoman, sees it this way: “We first have to ask ourselves: What do we want to be able to do? So what capabilities do we want to make available and how does that fit together on the European continent and within NATO and then think about it let’s see how much money it costs. ”

She thus remains on the defense line of her party, which is constantly seeking a balance between the content of the “Party of Peace” and the “reliable partner of the soldiers”. No other security policy program has as many ifs and buts as that of the SPD.

FDP wants to reform procurement

The FDP points out that there is currently no shortage of money in the system. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann sums it up in a nutshell: “Money is important, but not everything, we also have to get the money out on the streets. That means that the Bundeswehr’s procurement system must finally be improved.”

Almost all parties agree that the purchase and distribution of armaments and articles for daily soldiers’ needs must be regulated differently. The fact that several defense ministers have already failed because of this shows the size of the task.

Incidentally, all parties really agree that Germany needs a fundamental security policy debate. Incidentally, this is also something that soldiers want. A brief survey at the Lehnin military training area at least shows that the “citizens in uniform” believe that the Bundeswehr should be talked about a little more – here in Germany.