GERMANY’S defence minister says an EU army is “already taking shape” as the bloc looks to deepen military cooperation between member states.
Ursula Von der Leyen said Europe “needs to improve its ability to act on behalf of its own security” at a time of global uncertainty, adding major progress has been made towards realising a joint defence force.
Like the development of the EU’s single market and free movement principle, developing a European army will take time, she said.
But she said cooperation between member states has been boosted in recent months thanks to new reforms and the “obvious benefit” of working together.
Writing in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, Ms Von der Leyen hit back at claims by another German politician who argued the EU should forge ahead with building a “real European army” instead of just talking about it.
In response, she said Wolfgang Clement was right in principle but had neglected to mention “the progress we Europeans have made in the last few years”.
She said: “Europe’s army is already taking shape.
“Reforms over the past months and years have brought our armed forces closer together. We’re working quickly.
“But let’s not forget that achievements that are now taken for granted, such as the internal EU market or freedom of movement didn’t happen overnight.
“They came about thanks to careful, measured progress, and member states pursing clear goals, one step after another.”
EU leaders including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have previously expressed their hopes of forming an EU defence force.
Germany building an army and what could go wrong, remind me of a joke;
The Devil asked Hitler” if you went back up there what would you make different”
Hitler replied “no more Mr. nice guy.”
Post-Hitler Germany has been a loyal ally of the USA since the late 1940s, when they re-armed, at our request. They now are working on a European army, which they, given their tremendous guilt feelings about the Nazis, will probably not have control of. The modern Germans are anything else but aggressive towards their neighbors, they recognize Alsace as part of France and don’t even mention that Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland were ethnically cleansed of the near 100% German population (with 2.5 million dead) in the last days of the war and the first months of peace. If they are re-arming, they do so as friends and allies. This article uses offensive stereotypes regarding the German character and I find nothing funny about it. It is time to get over the two world wars.
Actually, Germany has had an army for some time now, whether we in this country have been aware of it, or not.
Consider a Handelsblatt Today article entitled “Germany’s ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan – Germany has extended the mandate for its armed forces in Afghanistan another year, and added more troops. They now have the second biggest presence after the US, even while the mission’s goals remain vague” by Moritz Koch ist USA-Korrespondent, and Donata Riedel on 03/23/2018, as follows:
Almost 17 years after Western troops arrived, stability and peace remain elusive.
The German government this week extended the deployment of Germany’s armed forces in Afghanistan another year, with the mission now focusing on combating the causes of migration.
The number of soldiers dispatched will increase from 980 to 1,300, which would make it the second-largest force behind the United States.
“We’re doing this so that the trainers can actually train the military there and don’t just sit in the barracks because of the security situation,” said Johann Wadephul, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the party’s deputy parliamentary leader for foreign and defense policy.
“The goal is still to enable the security forces to control the country.”
Afghanistan is still a long way from that.
The central government’s sovereignty extends only to individual parts of the country.
Many experts regard President Ashraf Ghani as more like the mayor of Kabul than the head of the whole state.
Politicians in Germany’s coalition government believe this cynicism is excessive, noting that the government is withstanding the Taliban’s terror campaign and that it controls 60 percent of the country.
Yet even in Berlin, no one wants to specify how much longer the German armed forces’ mission in Afghanistan will continue.
“We need strategic patience in Afghanistan.”
“We can’t yet foresee how long it will last,” Fritz Felgentreu, the defense policy spokesperson for Germany’s Social Democratic Party, told Handelsblatt.
end quotes
If the rug-chewing madman Herr Hitler, or der Führer as he liked to be called, was a part of this crowd, he’d have never gotten farther than Berlin, so I think with this level of incompetence displayed that the world is safe from the scourge of the German “SUPERMAN” for some time yet.
Then there is a DW article entitled “Bundeswehr in Afghanistan: What you need to know” which tells us as follows concerning Germany’s military might of today:
Germany’s role in NATO
West Germany officially joined the trans-Atlantic alliance in 1955.
However, it wasn’t until after reunification in 1990 that the German government considered “out of area” missions led by NATO.
From peacekeeping to deterrence, Germany’s Bundeswehr has since been deployed in several countries across the globe in defense of its allies.
end quotes
And Radio Free Europe has an article entitled “German Cabinet Approves Troop Increase For Afghanistan” from 7 March 2018 where we were informed as follows:
Germany has contributed to NATO missions in Afghanistan for the past 17 years.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government also agreed on April 7 to extend the German military’s missions in Iraq, Mali, South Sudan, and the NATO-led Sea Guardian operation in the Mediterranean Sea.
end quotes
So they definitely are already out there, and in fact, a friend of mine who was an Army Ranger attached to the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps before Big Bush’s war in Iraqinam was in Norway for arctic training when the German military, which was a part of that special forces unit, was allowed on Norwegian soil for the first time since WWII.
The ARRC was created on 2 October 1992 in Bielefeld based on the former British I Corps (or I (BR) Corps).
It was originally created as the rapid reaction corps sized land force of the Reaction Forces Concept that emerged after the end of the Cold War, with a mission to redeploy and reinforce within Allied Command Europe (ACE) and to conduct Petersberg missions out of NATO territory.
The Petersberg tasks are a list of military and security priorities incorporated within the European Security and Defence Policy of the European Union (renamed the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) per the Treaty of Lisbon).
The Petersberg tasks are the military tasks of a humanitarian, disarming, peacekeeping and peacemaking nature that the European Union (EU) is and the Western European Union (WEU) was empowered to do.
They were defined in the Petersberg Declaration during a ministerial summit of the Council of the WEU on 19 June 1992 at Hotel Petersberg, near Bonn in Germany.
There, the member states agreed to deploy their troops and resources from across the whole spectrum of the military under the authority of the WEU.
As a part of the partial merger of the WEU with the European Union, these tasks became part of the European Security and Defence Policy, and were central to strengthening the European Union’s second pillar, the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
In 1997, during the European summit in Amsterdam, the tasks were incorporated in the Treaty on European Union.
Both the WEU and the EU are empowered to enforce the Petersberg tasks, but with the transfer of the most important WEU assets to the EU in 1999, this distinction is mostly artificial.
The 2004 creation of the European Defence Agency made the WEU obsolete, and the WEU was abolished in 2011.
The Petersberg tasks cover a great range of possible military missions, ranging from the most simple to the most robust military intervention.
They are formulated as:
Humanitarian and rescue tasks
Peacekeeping tasks
Tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking.
Officially, the range of tasks the EU commits itself to “includes” the above, but is not limited to them.
In practice, the task of territorial defence is considered the domain of NATO.
As 22 of the 28 EU member states are also NATO members, there are many provisions to prevent competition with NATO.
So what can go wrong?
Given the association with military operations of SNAFU, TARFU, SUSFU, FUBU, FUBAR and BOHICA, probably everything, which just serves to make and keep life interesting.
Germany has had its own military since it started the Bundeswehr in the last 1950s under the training of its allies. In fact, the German Airborne School, the Luftlande/Lufttransporteschule now based in Altenstadt-Schongau, was set up and initially run by the US 11th Airborne Division.
Today its military is also very underfunded, many of its vehicles, tanks, planes, etc., are out of service due to lack of parts and repair (these cost lots of money), and their ever-shrinking population makes it increasingly difficult to fill the ranks. The days of The Big Bad German Army, threatening its neighbors, exist now only in old movies.
That’s because the movies were real, at least to all the Germans wasted in Italy and Russia.
“Smiling Albert” Kesselring went through quite a few of them for good around Anzio and Monte Cassino alone.
Where have all the soldiers gone, indeed.
The rug-chewing madman Hitler wasted them and destroyed them on the alter of his vanity.
And the days of the Albert Kesselring’s in Germany are gone as well.
Such it is, when it is, for reasons of its own.
The people who defeated the legions of Caesar Augustus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, described as the Varian Disaster by Roman historians, are now BMW salesmen.
The Battle in the Teutoburg Forest took place in 9 CE, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and decisively destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Publius Quinctilius Varus.
The German alliance was led by Arminius, a Germanic officer of Varus’s auxilia, who had acquired Roman citizenship and had received a Roman military education, which enabled him to deceive the Roman commander methodically and anticipate the Roman army’s tactical responses.
Despite several successful campaigns and raids by the Romans in the years after the battle, they never again attempted to conquer the Germanic territories east of the Rhine river.
The victory of the Germanic tribes against Rome’s legions in the Teutoburg Forest would have far-reaching effects on the subsequent history of both the ancient Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.
Contemporary and modern historians have generally regarded Arminius’ victory over Varus as “Rome’s greatest defeat,” one of the most decisive battles recorded in military history, and as “a turning-point in world history”.
As to airborne operations, at the beginning of WWII, we didn’t have any, and that task of assembling an American airborne force fell to James Maurice “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, who was at West Point in the Tactics Faculty there at the time the German Blitzkrieg was steamrolling over Europe in real time, not a war game study.
As a member of the Tactics Faculty, Gavin was requested to analyze and understand the German tactics, vehicles, and armaments, and it was at that time that Gavin talked about using airborne forces based on the Russians and Germans:
“From what we had seen so far, it was clear the most promising area of all was airborne warfare, bringing the parachute troops and the glider troops to the battlefield in masses, especially trained, armed, and equipped for that kind of warfare.”
Gavin especially took an interest in the German airborne assault on the Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium in May 1940, in which well-equipped German paratroopers dropped from the sky at night and captured the fort, and of interest to Virginia, that German airborne assault and his extensive study on Stonewall Jackson’s movement tactics led him to volunteer for a posting in the new airborne unit in April 1941.
Ah, yes, “Stonewall” Jackson!
But it’s best not to say that name today, the dude was a Confederate, afterall, so I’ll just move along by saying that Gavin began training at the new Parachute School in Fort Benning in August 1941, and after graduating in August, his first command was as a captain and the commanding officer of C Company of the newly established 503rd Parachute Infantry Battalion.
Gavin’s friends William T. Ryder, commander of airborne training, and William P. Yarborough, communications officer of the Provisional Airborne Group, convinced Colonel William C. Lee to let Gavin develop the tactics and basic rules of airborne combat.
One of Gavin’s first priorities was determining how airborne troops could be used most effectively.
His first action was writing FM 31-30: Tactics and Technique of Air-Borne Troops.
He used information about Soviet and German experiences with paratroopers and glider troops, and also used his own experience in tactics and warfare.
The manual contained information about tactics, but also about the organization of the paratroopers, what kind of operations they could execute, and what they would need to execute their task effectively.
In February 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Gavin took a condensed course at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which qualified him to serve on the staff of a division.
He returned to the Provisional Airborne Group and was tasked with building up an airborne division.
In the spring of 1942, Gavin and Lee went to Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to discuss the order of battle for the first U.S. airborne division.
The 82nd Infantry Division, then stationed in Camp Claiborne, Louisiana and commanded by Major General Omar Bradley, was selected to be converted into the first American airborne division and subsequently became the 82nd Airborne Division.
And the 82d Airborne went on to kick a lot of German ***** in WWII, so it is interesting to see how far that circle turned after WWII, with Americans in charge of German airborne training.