According to Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Bundeswehr will have to take on more missions in support of other NATO member states in the coming years. “I think we have to assume that international crisis management, in which many NATO forces have found themselves in recent years, will tend to decline and that we will have to concentrate more on classic national and alliance defense,” he said on Tuesday during his visit to the 23rd Mountain Infantry Brigade in Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria.
In the past 14 months he has been on the eastern flank of almost all NATO member countries, said Steinmeier. In doing so, he learned “how great the expectations are, but also how great the trust in Germany, in the German Bundeswehr, that we are making our contribution to shared security in NATO.” He explicitly referred to his visits to Estonia, Slovakia and Lithuania. Furthermore, forces such as the mountain troops are “urgently needed”, which can be deployed quickly and are “of great value” in national and alliance defense.
Steinmeier thanked the soldiers for their many deployments abroad in recent years and underlined that the mountain troops would also play a very important role in the upcoming withdrawal of the German armed forces from Mali. “It’s not a completely safe retreat that’s taking place there,” he said. He described the withdrawal from the West African country as the right decision. “The cooperation with the new government there, with the new leadership of the country there, is such that the decision was rightly made to withdraw there. The willingness to cooperate that we need does not exist to the required extent.”