Old reflexes are stirring across Europe. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the Bundestag last year that Germany must field the strongest conventional army in Europe and backed that promise with bigger defense budgets than any of the country’s neighbors could afford, the specter of German military power began to haunt Europe once more.
Behind closed doors, some French and Polish officials ask whether a rearmed Germany really solves Europe’s dependence on the United States— or merely swaps one hegemon for another. Others wonder whether European NATO members are heading toward a genuinely integrated defense of their continent—or simply back to rival national armies now that the United States no longer leads.
The reflex against a reaming Germany, however, is as much industrial as it is strategic. In June, Berlin withdrew from a Franco-German-Spanish program to build a new fighter jet—in part because Germany would no longer let a French company claim the lion’s share of the work—and scrapped a major contract with a Dutch-led consortium for naval frigates, ordering new ones from a German defense contractor instead. Thus, two of Europe’s biggest defense contracts are now flowing to German industry on German terms. Some of the huffing over a remilitarized Germany is really about France losing the German money pots and strategic deference that it long took for granted.
Unease over Germany going it alone is as old as the Bundeswehr itself: In 1955, West Germany was permitted to rearm only inside a tight alliance corset precisely so that German power would never stand alone again. Hundreds of thousands of U.S., British, and French occupation forces-turned-allies remained on German soil for several decades to underline those strictures.
But those who worry about a mighty Germany going it alone need to face an uncomfortable truth: NATO needs a powerful German military backed by the continent’s biggest economy and deepest fiscal pockets. A corollary to this is that only Germany has the potential to replace the United States as the military backbone and integrator of the bloc. But today, the Bundeswehr is far from strong enough to play that role. The paradox is that in order to bolster Europe’s collective defense and act as an eventual integrator that other countries’ forces can plug into, the German military needs to be able to stand on its own first—and be less integrated into the alliance than it is now. In certain respects, it is in Europe’s collective interest for Germany to go it alone.
That’s because NATO’s current multinational force structures are a relic of Europe’s post-Cold War peace era. They are poorly suited for a potential high-intensity, 21st-century war with Russia. NATO’s European forces are already burdened by disjointed structures, national caveats, and cumbersome chains of command—and the way they have been assembled into multinational forces is a product of intra-alliance diplomacy during peacetime, not of a laser focus on effectiveness in war. With the United States dropping out as NATO’s integrator and technological enabler, the disadvantages of the alliance’s current structure will multiply.
The Bundeswehr must achieve cohesion as a fighting force. Coalition warfighting in the style of post-Cold War NATO expeditions to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Libya—with convoluted chains of command, national caveats, and a separate rule for every flag—is simply not suited to a 21st-century fight against Russia, where the tempo of operations will not wait for a coalition to reconcile its opinions.
Above all, the Bundeswehr needs to force a change at the level of the NATO corps. The alliance maintains roughly nine multinational European corps headquarters, each able to command up to 60,000 soldiers on paper. Each of these corps is led by one or more “framework nations” and assigned to a separate geographical region, including several corps along the bloc’s northeastern flank. Above the corps level, there are land commands to synchronize multiple corps and fix wartime responsibilities in advance.
The demands on these corps are changing fast. A possible NATO-Russia war could well be fought at an operational scale and intensity that NATO has by and large forgotten since the end of the Cold War. Can NATO’s current multinational corps and divisions really sustain cohesion in such an environment? They have never been tested in combat at that scale. Yet that is precisely how NATO envisions a future fight.
What’s more, NATO’s corps are paper tigers. Rather than being fully equipped formations, they are essentially headquarters waiting to mobilize, integrate, and command artillery, air defense, and deep-strike assets that, for the most part, they do not have in the quantities needed.
NATO needs to fundamentally change how its corps are built, and a Bundeswehr focusing more than it does now on its national capabilities is central to that change.
First, each NATO corps needs to have its own suite of weapons and other equipment provided by the lead nation of the corps. These include corps artillery, precision fires, air defense, logistics, as well as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance provided by the lead nation of the corps. That looks very different today. For example, the 1st German-Netherlands Corps has an established headquarters but—unlike a fully equipped U.S. corps—no permanent corps-level artillery, air defense, or intelligence. In case of war, many of these and other capabilities would have to be generated and bolted onto the corps from the Bundeswehr, the Royal Netherlands Army, and the militaries of more than a dozen other nations during a sudden mobilization. Standing up a headquarters is the easy part. Generating actual capabilities with operational reach—beyond a plan to cobble them together only after a decision to mobilize—is the much harder one.
Perhaps Germany ought to take Poland as an example. NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast, which Poland anchors alongside Germany and Denmark, does not have any more of its own assets than the German-Dutch one. But it sits atop a fast-expanding Polish national force of mass artillery, long-range fires, and soon Apache attack helicopters. Anchored on a single strong national backbone and command, the Polish-led force may end up with readier access to corps-level combat power than the German one assembled from various countries’ contributions.
Second, in order to maintain cohesion as a fighting force, a corps needs a national headquarters to which allied units are subordinated. Only a corps leadership directly commanding all of its own full-spectrum capabilities can have fast, unconditional, and fully integrated access to those capabilities. Under NATO’s framework-nation arrangement today, those capabilities are contributed by partner nations that retain national command authority, apply their own caveats, and can withhold or withdraw their assets. This means that every task and targeting decision risks hitting a veto in one capital or another.
The alliance’s record shows what happens under the current arrangement. When Germany abstained from NATO’s Libya intervention in 2011, it pulled its crews out of the alliance’s jointly manned AWACS fleet within days. A critical shared asset was thus left partially unmanned by a single capital’s political choice, even as Berlin backfilled NATO’s AWACS crews in Afghanistan to soften the blow. During the war in Afghanistan, approval loops running back to European capitals routinely delayed operations, with the Bundeswehr among the most restricted.
Some may argue that such caveats and frictions would largely evaporate in a Russian attack on NATO. Perhaps. But a defense built on the hope that national politics suddenly disappears under fire is a risky gamble. Consequently, if Berlin is serious about strengthening European defense and deterrence, it needs to change its own cumbersome decision-making process and press others to get rid of national caveats, too.
None of this means that individual allied units cannot be folded into a corps led by Germany or another nation. Dutch brigades, for example, already serve inside German divisions, a Czech brigade is affiliated with the German 10th Armored Division, and a Romanian brigade is assigned to Germany’s Rapid Forces Division.
Third, to be an effective fighting force, a corps needs authority over its units, regardless of their nationality, long before the shooting starts. Affiliation today is largely on paper and remains episodic in reality: Allied units assigned to German ones, for example, exercise with them occasionally but remain by and large garrisoned at home. Cohesion is built in peacetime or not at all. The shared drills, common terminology, and mutual trust between staffs that enable orders to move down the chain at wartime tempo cannot be improvised after the shooting starts.
The Dutch 43rd Mechanized Brigade, which trains, plans, and deploys as an organic part of Germany’s 1st Panzer Division, shows what proper integration looks like; unfortunately, this example is not widely replicated. What is needed is year-round practice of training to lead-nation standards under a lead-nation chain of command. And it must be practiced in the field, not in command-post simulations. Corps-level live maneuvers, largely abandoned after the Cold War, are where a NATO framework-nation corps either becomes real or is exposed as a paper tiger. Tabletop exercises are not sufficient.
If Berlin genuinely wants to become an anchor and integrator of Europe’s deterrence and defense, its military paradoxically needs to become more national. A Germany that can lead a complete corps under wartime conditions is a Germany that the rest of Europe can actually plug into. But that requires the command architecture, doctrine, and deep-battle assets to be German-owned and unconditionally available to a commander fighting an aggressor in the 21st century. Once you get over your old reflexes about German might, this is good news for deterrence. We finally need to think of NATO as a wartime alliance, not a peacetime alliance-management tool.