Last year, Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, made a pledge that would have been unthinkable not long ago: to send a combat brigade to be permanently deployed in Lithuania. The plan was to station almost 5,000 troops an hour away from the Suwalki Corridor, the 40-mile-long border between Poland and Lithuania, flanked by Belarus to the east and the Russian exclave Kaliningrad to the west. Scholz, and his new defence minister, Boris Pistorius, wanted to transform Germany’s military from a medium-sized operational force to one which can be Europe’s first line of defence if Vladimir Putin ever attacks a Nato territory.
If Scholz’s announcement seemed too good to be true that’s because it was. So far just 30 German soldiers have been sent to Lithuania. The pledge also came as a surprise to the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed forces, who were not consulted beforehand. Pistorius (whose only military experience is his year in national service more than 40 years ago) believes in the politics of big targets: if you announce the plan, others have to find a way of making it work. ‘The speed of the project clearly shows that Germany understands the new security reality,’ he said. ‘We have to take into account that Putin will one day attack a Nato country.’ According to a classified document leaked to the tabloid
Bild, the Bundeswehr is wargaming scenarios of a possible Russian attack on the Suwalki Corridor by May next year.
‘Pistorius wants to send a tank battalion without tanks to Lithuania. What kind of signal is this?’
But if Scholz and Pistorius had consulted the military, they might have been warned against wishful thinking and told that re-galvanising the Bundeswehr is a far harder job than their rhetoric suggests. ‘The army that I am allowed to lead is more or less empty,’ admitted Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, the head of the Bundeswehr, in 2022. ‘The options that we can offer politicians to support the alliance are extremely limited.’ Mais worried that the politicians in Berlin would react to Putin’s invasion by sending arms to Ukraine, running down the troops even more. His fears were justified. It wasn’t long before the few functioning Leopard tanks Germany had were sent to Ukraine.
In an internal memo from November last year, leaked to
Der Spiegel, Mais said that across the board the army had only about 60 per cent of the equipment it needs, ‘from A for artillery pieces to Z for tent tarpaulin (
Zeltbahn)’. Across a spreadsheet, he listed nearly 2,000 crucial items missing from Germany’s arsenal, from piping and fireproof gloves to, rather pointedly, a new fleet of Leopard tanks. This shortage list, Mais dryly concluded, ‘makes clear the diversity and small-scale nature of the challenges’. All this is before the financial costs of the huge Lithuanian deployment, he said, which had not yet been budgeted.
It’s hard for Pistorius to hide the army’s deficiencies. One of the two tank brigades he has promised to Lithuania, the Panzerbataillon 203 from Augustdorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, has no tanks. All the ones it had have been sent to Ukraine. Pistorius says replacements will be delivered directly to Lithuania in 2026 (assuming the contractors deliver on time) but until then the soldiers will have to practise on simulators. ‘Pistorius wants to send a tank battalion without tanks to Lithuania,’ says Ingo Gädechens, who sits on the Bundestag’s defence committee. ‘What kind of signal is this to our Lithuanian allies?’