The Strategic Studies Institute recently published A Hard Look at Hard Power: Assessing the Defense Capabilities of Key U.S. Allies and Security Partners. Edited by Gary J. Schmitt, codirector of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at AEI, and featuring contributions from him, AEI scholar Michael Mazza, and others, it fills critical gaps in information “about the actual hard power resources of America’s allies.”
Changing military realities around the world mean that Germany will have to take more responsibility, along with its European neighbors, to provide for defense and security; however, with a stagnating defense budget and a national ambivalence towards military deployments and defense involvements, Germany will find it harder to rise to this role. Patrick Keller details this dilemma:
In response to the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing European debt crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government adopted a constitutional amendment limiting new federal debt to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). To comply with this break on debt (Schuldenbremse), in 2010, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble prescribed every ministry an exact amount of money to be saved over the following 4 years. In relation to its overall budget, defense had to cut the most: €8.3 billion until 2014. Considering that the annual German defense budget is only about €30 billion, the prescribed reduction was substantial—especially for a military establishment already existing on limited means. …
Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg visits German soldiers serving in Kosovo as part of the NATO-led peace force, in Prizeren, some 90 km (56 miles) southwest of capital Pristina March 30, 2010.
From 1991 until 1997, German defense spending was continually decreasing (from about €28 billion to €23 billion and, correspondingly, from approximately 2 percent of GDP to 1.6 percent). With the Kosovo War, the “peace dividend” era was over. Since 2001, defense spending has been on a slow but steady rise, with only minor cuts in 2003 and 2010. The financial crisis, starting in 2008, did not have a discernible effect on this trend. Indeed, the projected cuts for 2014 and 2015 might yet be reversed—after all, the administration’s original projected defense budget for 2013 was €31.4 billion, well below the €33.3 billion that was actually allocated.
At the same time, German increases in defense spending have remained modest and have not even offset the effects of inflation over the past 20 years. In real terms, defense spending has been decreasing. Moreover, with defense spending at around 1.25 percent of GDP, Germany obviously does not make defense a budget priority. (The budget of the ministry of labor and welfare is more than four times the size of that of the ministry of defense.) Needless to say, Germany does not meet the pledge made by the NATO allies at the 2002 Prague NATO Summit to spend at least 2 percent of national GDP on defense.
Download A Hard Look at Hard Power: Assessing the Defense Capabilities of Key U.S. Allies and Security Partners here.
This post was written by Ash Malhotra, an AEIdeas intern, and edited by Sarah Gustafson, Editorial Assistant at the AEIdeas blog.
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