On Germany's Armor Orders

At this stage of things it is difficult to say very much about the Russo-Ukrainian War now dragging into its fourth year. The plain and simple truth of the matter is that an ongoing war, with its "fog," secrecy and deception, is a far harder thing to analyze than a past one in even the best of circumstances--and these are not the best of circumstances. Everything that has happened in this conflict has made it very clear that those experts with any sort of platform from which one can address the broad public have been profoundly lacking in insight. They did not understand either Russia or Ukraine, not just their armed forces, but also their economies and their societies and what they would and would not be able to bear up under the strains of a war like this one. (Remember how for almost three years now Russia has been on the verge of totally running out of ammunition, but it just never happened? How one side or the other has always been about to collapse, but here they still are, fighting?) But then where "Establishment expert" is concerned (and it is this which the media gives us) the accent is on the Establishment part, not the expert part, all as having understanding to impart to the public is not likely to be a requirement of their job. To go by the results that would seem to be giving the public the "mushroom treatment," which is the real "skill set" of these "experts," and a not uncommon mission for them, which they consistently fulfill with zeal.

Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to its rendering transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions in the age of the small drone. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.

Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).

What could the German government's planners be thinking here?

One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)

The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.