Deepening Ties
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Intro: German Army Chief Lieutenant General Hans-Otto Budde was in India May 19 to 24. In a nearly week-long visit, after his meeting with his Indian counterpart General Deepak Kapoor, he visited the Para Brigade in Agra, the Southwestern Army Command in Jaipur as well as the Infantry School and Army College for Combat in Mhow. He also stopped by at the United Service Institution and the United Nation Centre for Peacekeeping Operations (UNCPKO). General Budde’s visit following those by the German Navy Chief in December 2006 and the German Air Chief in 2007, was aimed at deepening Indo-German defence ties. In April, the Indo-German High Defence Committee had met in Berlin and endorsed the latest annual Indo-German cooperation programme. Recently, the Indian and the German Navies undertook a three-day bilateral exercise off Kochi. Over 700 personnel from the German Task Force comprising the Federal German Ship (FGS) F220 Hamburg, an air-defence ship; frigate F211 Koeln; and replenishment tanker FGS Berlin participated in the exercise. The Indians fielded two frigates apart from a helicopter and training ships — INS Tir and INS Krishna. Ever since the signing of the Indo-German Defence Cooperation Agreement in September 2006, Indo-German military ties have been going from strength to strength. In this exclusive article for FORCE, Lieutenant General Budde underlines the growing Indo-German cooperation in defence, even as he highlights the new challenges before the German Army.
Up to two decades ago, the question as to what constitutes success of military operations was relatively easy to answer: victory in a war fought by regular forces, winning a largely ‘symmetrical’ armed conflict. For us, security was equated with deterrence and a defence capability aimed at maintaining the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Germany. This was the principle towards which the structures, equipment and training of the German Army were consistently oriented. The paradigm shift in security policy after the end of the Cold War changed that equation in an incredible and an unforeseeable way. Today, the German Army is an ‘army on operations’ with the capabilities to conduct full-spectrum operations — at all times and on a worldwide scale.
Future challenges
For Germany too, the threat of symmetric conflict has progressively been replaced by new risks and threats over the past few years: international terrorism, religiously motivated extremism, the break-up of entire regions, combined with the denationalisation of force, as well as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. New risks and dangers, such as attacks on information systems, that generally and very quickly make themselves felt also at international level pose a hitherto unknown type of threat. Going hand-in-hand with this is a trend towards privatisation of warfare that has noticeably progressed over the past two decades. While inter-state conflicts and wars cannot be ruled out in the future, the crucial development is that the state is slowly but steadily losing its monopoly on the use of force.
The Defence Policy Guidelines, the Bundeswehr Concept and the Federal Government’s White Paper on Germany’s security and defence policy all respond to these challenges to our security in the 21st century. Thus, the central task of the armed forces continues to be national and collective defence in the classical sense, but for the foreseeable future, the most likely tasks will be operations in the context of international conflict prevention and crisis management, including the fight against terrorism.
This necessitates that the German Army have the capabilities to conduct military operations across the entire spectrum of peace enforcement and peacekeeping in support of nation building through to humanitarian assistance. For 15 years now the German Army has borne the main responsibility for operations in the context of the German contribution to international crisis management. Over 3,300 Army personnel are presently deployed over three continents on operations for peace, security and stability. In addition to this, because we are a Nato Response Force framework nation the German Army regularly contributes a third of land forces and additionally some 50 per cent of the necessary troops for the European Battle groups.
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