As of: March 9, 2024, 12:14 p.m
By: Bettina Menzel
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Boris Pistorius (SPD), Federal Minister of Defense, with Carsten Breuer, Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, in December 2023. © IMAGO/Thomas Trutschel/photothek
The Bundeswehr should become “war-ready”.
To achieve this, unclear responsibilities must also be minimized.
The Defense Minister wants to decide on structural changes in the force in April.
Berlin – Shortly after taking office as Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius (SPD) announced a restructuring in his house.
The Bundeswehr should also get a new structure.
The first details about the reform plans have now leaked out.
The reintroduction of compulsory military service is therefore not entirely out of the question.
At least, according to one expert, appropriate structures are in place for a possible resumption.
The Defense Minister wants to decide on the structural changes in April.
Align the Bundeswehr with national defense: Pistorius is planning structural reform
The restructuring of the Ministry of Defense is considered complete, but it was not without criticism.
Now it's the Bundeswehr's turn.
For years, the force was focused on international crisis management, but in view of the war in Ukraine, the focus should return to national defense.
Germany must get used to the idea that “we may have to wage a defensive war one day,” the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, Carsten Breuer, emphasized last year and criticized the fact that there are structures in the Bundeswehr “that allow quick and targeted decisions to make impossible."
Pistorius recently commissioned a project group to submit proposals for structural reform of the Bundeswehr.
The 34-page report is available to
Business Insider
, as the portal reported on Friday (March 8).
According to the paper, the goal is to “be war-ready in order to be able to deter”.
The Inspector General's criticism is apparently being taken into account: overlaps in areas of responsibility should be reduced to a minimum and with it the “danger of time-consuming coordination, mismanagement and diffusion of responsibility,” says the paper.
This is intended to speed up decision-making processes.
Structural changes in the Bundeswehr: This is what the project group report says
Fourth branch of the armed forces “Cyber and Information Space” (CIR)
: In addition to the existing three branches of the navy, air force and army
An operational command command of the Bundeswehr
: The two command commands for operations abroad and at home will be merged to enable management from a single source
Formation of a “Support Command”
: The “Support Command” is to be created, among other things, by merging the previously independent armed forces base and the medical service.
The medical service should be led by a “Chief Medical Officer”
Aviation Office of the Bundeswehr
: is subordinate to the Air Force as a branch of the armed forces
Establishment of four regional personnel centers
: In human resources, the regional personnel centers are to be subordinated to the Bundeswehr's personnel office in order to increase the ability to react in the event of an emergency
Mobile administrative elements in military structures
: So-called “Embedded Support Organizations” (ESO) are intended to better integrate the military administration and the troops
Establishment of the “Federal Armed Forces Specialist Tasks Department”
: to relieve the armed forces of so-called Bundeswehr-joint tasks
Now subordinate to the army
: The military police and NBC defense units are to be subordinated to the army.
Likewise the command for civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) and the guard battalion in Berlin, which is assigned to the military police.
The homeland security forces are also subordinate to the army.
Source: Business Insider with reference to the Bundeswehr document from the project group
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Restructuring of the Bundeswehr: Possibility of reintroducing compulsory military service?
The structure of the procurement office remains unchanged, but it is intended to be made able to act more quickly through 70 individual measures.
And in the civilian organizational sector, too, the focus is to be placed on war capability: According to this, the establishment of “structures for the resumption of compulsory conscription for basic military service” has been created, i.e. the fundamental possibility of implementing any compulsory military service that may be reintroduced, as the expert Thomas Wiegold in
analyzed
straight ahead
on his blog .
The Defense Minister's decision on the restructuring of the Bundeswehr should be ready by the beginning of April.
Concepts with concrete timelines will then be developed, which will be sent to Inspector General Breuer and Defense State Secretary Nils Hilmer by October 1, 2024.
Pistorius, however, faces further challenges in the future.
As internal calculations by the Ministry of Defense show, there will be a financial gap of 56 billion euros in the Bundeswehr in four years.