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Does Military Production And Activity Add To The Climate Emergency – With war on the horizon, Germany is planning a major military buildup. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s plan to increase defense spending could turn Germany’s beleaguered army into the strongest armed forces in Europe – an idea that has met with resistance in the past.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks as he arrives to visit the Joint Operational Command of the German Armed Forces in Schwielowsee near Berlin, March 4. Michael Sohn/AP hide caption

Does Military Production And Activity Add To The Climate Emergency

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks as he arrives to visit the Joint Operational Command of the German Armed Forces in Schwielowsee near Berlin, March 4.

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BERLIN — The announcement came three days after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine last month, and only a few German lawmakers were privy to what Chancellor Olaf Scholz would say: that Germany would pour 100 billion euros into its beleaguered military, putting it on pace to be the strongest armed forces in Europe.

Scholz added that Germany will now invest more than 2% of its gross domestic product in its armed forces. According to data collected by NATO, Germany is expected to spend 1.53% of GDP on defense last year.

The German parliament erupted into a rare ovation, a roar that filled the main hall of the Reichstag, the building whose destruction and rebirth was at the center of the horrors of the last world war. Now it was once again witnessing what the Germans labeled the Zeitenwende: a historical turning point.

Defense expert Jana Puglierin watched in disbelief. “It was mind-blowing to me to see this because a lot of the things that he basically decided overnight I had been fighting [for] for years and I was sure I would never see them materialize,” she says.

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Puglierin, who heads the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, says she has heard calls from Germany’s allies for years to step up and spend more on defense and provide more leadership, while the German government has repeatedly rejected the idea.

German Bundeswehr soldiers from NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence Battalion wait to greet German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht upon her arrival at the Rukla military base in Lithuania on February 22. Germany’s chancellor has vowed to increase defense spending after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Mindaugas Kulbis/AP hide caption

German Bundeswehr soldiers from NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence Battalion wait to greet German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht upon her arrival at the Rukla military base in Lithuania on February 22. Germany’s chancellor has vowed to increase defense spending after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine.

She says defense spending wasn’t even an issue in the country’s election last fall. “And I think the main reason for that was that German citizens didn’t feel threatened for a long time,” she says. “They never saw that their security was actually a fragile thing. They took it for granted. And the very idea that, I don’t know, a Russian missile would hit Germany was completely absurd.”

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This German way of thinking is rooted in a past that many citizens find difficult to reckon with; a time when the country, under Adolf Hitler, built one of the world’s largest armies. “They started the war, and it’s obvious that all the industry was turned into the army. And then everything was flattened,” says military expert Constantin Wissman.

,” says World War II not only destroyed the German military, but left a trail of shame around its future. “And in fact, you can see a lot of the problems the German military has now stem from that time because we never felt comfortable with the military.”

After the end of the Cold War, Germany cut its defense budget and used its reduced military not so much to protect its homeland as to help NATO missions abroad, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan. The state of the German military suffered so much that in 2015, during a joint NATO exercise, German troops were forced to use black-painted brooms instead of rifles due to a lack of equipment.

When parliament passes Scholz’s defense spending plan, the new funds will help, but the money won’t solve everything, Wissman says. “I think the structural deficits of the German military are getting deeper and they have structural problems that should be solved before you spend money on it.”

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Even with the new money, military analyst Thomas Wiegold says the German armed forces will still be forced to play catch-up. “Interestingly, this does not mean an increase in size,” says Wiegold. “This doesn’t even mean adding completely different capabilities. First and foremost, it means funding what should actually be there.”

A German soldier surveys the area at Faizabad Airport, northern Afghanistan in 2006. Germany has contributed thousands of troops to NATO forces in Afghanistan. Michael Hanschke/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A German soldier surveys the area at Faizabad Airport, northern Afghanistan in 2006. Germany has contributed thousands of troops to NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Things like modern fighter jets – earlier this month, Germany committed to buying nearly three dozen F-35s from Lockheed Martin to replace its 40-year-old fleet of Tornado jets. Wiegold says that’s just the beginning. Germany needs to buy new tanks, weapons and warships, among other things.

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And as Germany rebuilds its military, Wiegold says the rest of Europe will feel safer. He quotes a former Polish foreign minister who said: “I am not afraid of a strong German army. I am afraid of a weak German army.”

“It’s not that France or the United Kingdom or Italy or even the Poles would see a militarily strong Germany as a threat,” he says. “I think it’s more or less the other way around; that they expect Germany, with its economic power, to do its part on the security side.”

Defense expert Puglierin says he hopes Germany will move forward with the responsibility that Europe’s largest military carries with it. Because for too long, she says, Germany relied on the United States to help with its defense. “I’ve heard so many Europeans and Germans say, ‘Thank God we have the United States.’ But at the same time, we must understand that we should not take for granted that the United States is here to protect Europeans forever,” says Puglierin. “So I think we need to become a much more capable partner in the transatlantic relationship in order to create a transatlantic relationship on an equal footing.”

And she says that means not only sharing the burden of the US military, but also having a voice in the development of international security. She says that Germany is not only wary of Russia, but also of China, and depending on who takes over the White House in 2024, it is difficult to predict what Germany’s relationship with the US will be like. A stronger German army, she believes, should help Germany cope with this uncertainty; an army that is now on track to be the third largest in the world, behind only the US and Chinese armies.

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“What I hope to see is that we develop a healthy relationship to this notion of European sovereignty because I think it’s definitely necessary,” she says.

Puglierin says that the German leadership believed for decades that it could bring peace through trade and that it would not need a large army. But the world has become more unstable and unmanageable. And a capable army, she says, is now necessary. Seven European countries increased their defense budget in one month. Who will be next? Germany, Belgium, Romania, Italy, Poland, Norway and Sweden have pledged to increase defense spending against a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Soldiers of the German Bundeswehr participate in a ceremony during the German Defense Minister’s visit to the leadership of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) battle group in Rukla, Lithuania, February 22, 2022. (PETRAS MALUKAS/AFP via Getty Images)

PARIS: The war in Ukraine has been a powerful wake-up call for many European countries that have been basking in the post-Cold War comfort of thinking that armed conflict was consigned to history and that defense spending could be kept to a minimum.

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The turnaround since Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine has been nothing short of stunning, to the extent that six NATO members have now pledged a $133 billion defense boost to date; militarily neutral Sweden also promised an increase. And more and more nations seem poised to follow suit in the coming days and weeks.

The first to make a 180° turn was Germany. Just four days after the Russian invasion began, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that his government would increase its defense spending by 100 billion euros ($112 billion) in 2022 alone, taking defense spending from 1.53% of GDP be above 2%.

That’s a NATO-recommended figure estimated to be met by only the US, Greece (3.82%), Croatia (2.79%), the United Kingdom (2.29%), Estonia (2.28%) in 2021 ), Latvia (2.27%), Poland (2.10%), Lithuania (2.03%), Romania (2.02%) and France (2.01%), according to NATO statistics. (Germany’s failure to meet that threshold has been a major political sticking point under the Trump administration, leading to tensions between Washington and Berlin.)

– said Scholz

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