Germany May Need a Decade to Rebuild the Bundeswehr
Sigmar Gabriel says Germany may need about ten years to make the Bundeswehr capable of defending the country while continuing to rely heavily on US support.
Germany will need roughly a decade to bring the Bundeswehr to a level at which it can reliably defend the country, former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has repeatedly pledged to turn the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional army as quickly as possible.
Gabriel said many European Union countries were already making significant efforts to rearm. Germany, however, would still depend on support from the United States throughout the next ten years, he estimated.
The former foreign minister identified excessive bureaucracy and the slow pace of German society as one of the country’s main domestic problems. He argued that Germans themselves were responsible for this situation and that it could not be blamed on changes in global politics.
Gabriel also said Germany was failing to hold an honest debate about the causes of the serious difficulties facing the country.
In his view, similar problems are holding back the European Union as a whole. He pointed to the contradiction between repeated calls to reduce bureaucracy and the continued introduction of new regulations.