Dutch-German Military Cooperation: An Example For Europe?

[The Lawspeaker]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-VkBsetkRc


On Monday, March 19th the Netherlands Atlantic Association and the Royal Netherlands Society for Military Art and Science (KVBK) organized a program with generals Markus Laubenthal and Jan Swillens titled: "The Integration of Dutch-German Land Forces: an Example for Closer European Defence Cooperation?” The Dutch-German military cooperation started with the founding of the bi-national headquarters in Münster in 1995.

In the following years, this cooperation continued and developed. This resulted into the detachment of the 43 Mechanized Brigade to the 1st Panzerdivision, while a German battalion, including a Dutch tank company, is under the command of the 43 Mechanized Brigade. Such military integration brings about questions regarding the political decision making process concerning the deployment and the military effectiveness of these kind of divisions. Major General Laubenthal and Brigadier General Swillens talked about their view on these questions, followed by a panel discussion with several members of the Dutch House of Respresentatives with André Bosman (VVD), Isabelle Diks (GroenLinks) and Herman Schaper (D66).

[MinervaItalica]

I really doubt that an "European Army" will ever exist

Even though it is needed.

[Teutone]

Hope the European Army will never come such as any unification between the European national states.

[The Lawspeaker]

I really doubt that an "European Army" will ever be created...

Even though it is needed.

We don't need a European Army - but closer integration of both equipment and procedures would work. If we can cut costs by dumping 28 different weapons systems in favour of a joint purchase program, it might be a good idea.

[The Lawspeaker]

A European Army? The Germans and Dutch Take a Small Step (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/europe/germany-defense-spending-european-army.html)

By Katrin Bennhold (https://www.nytimes.com/by/katrin-bennhold)
Feb. 20, 2019

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/20/world/20germany-defense-print/merlin_150231870_f948422d-cc15-4976-8999-06805b799d44-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
Cpl. First Class Leon Berkepeis of the Netherlands, center, with German soldiers of Tank Battalion 414. Credit Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times


LOHHEIDE, Germany — On a former Cold War base, German and Dutch soldiers, serving together in one tank battalion, stood to attention one recent morning and shouted their battle cry in both languages.
“We fight —,” their commander bellowed.
“— for Germany!” the battalion replied in unison.
“We fight —,” the commander shouted.
“— for the Netherlands!” his soldiers yelled back.
They are not shouting “for Europe.” Not yet.

But the battalion — Europe’s first made up of soldiers from two countries — is an important baby step toward deeper European military cooperation. First floated after World War II, the idea of a European army is as old as the European Union itself, but has yet to become a reality.

Now, though, the idea has taken on new urgency because of the Trump administration’s threat to withdraw the Continent’s security guarantee if it does not spend more on its defense. At a high-level security conference last weekend, the breach (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/world/europe/trump-international-relations-munich.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Homepage&section=World) between the United States and Europe burst into the open, leaving many European officials feeling increasingly on their own.

“Everyone is talking about a European army,” Lt. Col. Marco Niemeyer, the German commander of the battalion, said. “We are pioneers.”

Yet if some powerful European leaders are talking more loudly about a European military, the political moment is fraught. Populist parties are surging across the Continent, amid a rising nationalism that threatens European cohesion and has made the prospect of surrendering sovereignty on a sensitive issue like national security even harder. Moreover, the practical challenges to more credible European defense cooperation are immense.

For any progress, analysts agree that Germany, Europe’s biggest and richest country, must do more, including overcome its post-World War II reluctance to lead in strategic matters. The German military already has too few soldiers, too little equipment and faces shortages of just about everything, even thermal underwear, which in some cases is being reclassified as “functional” so that it can be reused by others.

Given this backdrop, Tank Battalion 414 has become an informal test case for what needs to be done to achieve greater efficiencies and broader cooperation.

The military base in Lohheide is the continent’s difficult history writ small. Built by the Nazis in the 1930s, and used by Allied forces during the Cold War when West Germany was still NATO’s eastern border state, it is now home to an experiment in post-national defense.

The battalion is German, but one in four of its soldiers are Dutch. The tanks are German, the radio system is Dutch and the language of command increasingly English. Often Germans and Dutch ride in the same tank.
“We already work much more closely together than the politicians had envisaged,” said Colonel Niemeyer, the German commander.
“We no longer think in national terms,” he said.

“The values we’re defending are European,” he continued. “The border we’re defending is not between the Netherlands and Germany. It’s NATO’s eastern border.”
Would he die for Europe?
“Yes,” he said.

But the contrast between the idealism on display in the barracks and the absence of political leadership remains striking, analysts and defense experts say — especially in Berlin.

“There is a gigantic mismatch between the tactical-military and the political level,” said Jan Techau, director of the Europe Program at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

“The life we have had for the last 70 years is possible because of the American security guarantees we have had, largely for free,” Mr. Techau said. “That is the reason we are not Ukraine and live in a Russian sphere of influence.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/13/world/xxgermany-defense2/merlin_150231534_ff97419b-5cd8-47a2-8a01-2f050a71a932-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
The battalion, Europe’s first binational one, was born of necessity as much as a desire for deeper cooperation.Credit Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Ultimately, he said, the question President Trump has asked the Europeans is a fair one.
“We want to live in freedom,” Mr. Techau said. “But are we prepared to pay for it?”

At the end of the Cold War, Germany had 500,000 soldiers and more than 3,000 tanks, and spent 2.4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense.
Today, it has 182,000 soldiers and 325 tanks, and spends just 1.3 percent of G.D.P. on defense.

Despite signing a commitment to fellow NATO members to work toward spending 2 percent of G.D.P. by 2024, Germany has watered down the target (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/02/05/world/europe/ap-eu-germany-military-spending.html?module=inline)to 1.5 percent.

Germany’s defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, conceded in an interview that 25 years of downsizing had hollowed out structures. But she insisted that “we have passed the bottom and are on the right track.”

Military spending has increased for five straight years, she said, up 36 percent. Germany is NATO’s second-biggest contributor of funds and troops.

But critics say that is not good enough.

On average, only one in three of Germany’s Eurofighter jets and combat helicopters fly, according to figures published last year, the latest available. In January, just three of six submarines and well under half of the two dozen A400M transport planes were fit for purpose.

“In all areas there is a shortage of material,” Hans-Peter Bartels, Germany’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, wrote in a report this month.

Battalion 414 showcases the necessity of European cooperation: Germany has too few soldiers, the Dutch lack a tank program. But together they can make a battalion.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/13/world/xxgermany-defense4/merlin_150231648_5d28f4c6-6856-4488-869f-3e3243db7224-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
“We already work much more closely together than the politicans had envisaged,” said Lt. Col. Marco Niemeyer, center, the battalion’s German commander. Credit Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

“It is two fragile parties propping each other up,” said Thomas Wiegold, a respected military blogger (https://augengeradeaus.net/).
In an interview, Mr. Bartels said that he believed a European army — or an army of Europeans, as he prefers to call it — was the future, but that it would take a generation to form.

Efforts like Battalion 414 are “islands” that need to multiply and then coalesce into a credible continental defense structure, he said. It would also have to include a security council to make decisions about deploying forces, as well as a unified command.
All that is a challenge — not least because Germans simply don’t feel at risk.

Seven out of 10 Germans do not see Russia as a threat, recent surveys show. Three times more Germans trust President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China to “do the right thing” than Mr. Trump, who is seen as a bigger threat than North Korea.

“We have failed to explain to the German people how profoundly our geopolitical situation has changed and how profoundly that changes the role of Germany,” said Norbert Röttgen, a lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party.

One reason Battalion 414 has been so successful is that northern Germans and Dutch people are culturally close.
Despite talk by Ms. Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron of France about a “real European army, (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/world/europe/merkel-macron-european-army.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fsteven-erlanger&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=inline&version=latest&contentPlacement=17&pgtype=collection)” the experience of the Franco-German brigade in Alsace has been very different.

“The Germans don’t speak French; the French don’t speak English,” Mr. Bartels said.
Even more significant, he said, “the strategic cultures in France and Germany are very different, although there is the political will to compromise.”


https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/13/world/xxgermany-defense3/merlin_150231798_2b6c17e7-ff9f-4394-a4cd-b7f71dc1cabe-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
The pressures on Europe to provide for its own defense, including President Trump’s talk of leaving NATO, are the greatest since World War II. Credit Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

To make a European army work, Germany will have to overcome an innate caution since World War II about military intervention.
“For a long time there was a view in Germany that we must not get involved in conflicts because of our history, but that is changing,” the defense minister, Ms. von der Leyen, said. “It is precisely because of our history that we need to get involved.”

History is never far in Germany.

Cpl. First Class Leon Berkepeis is among 100 Dutch soldiers staffing German battle tanks under German command. His grandfather, a Dutch freedom fighter, was shot dead by the Germans during Hitler’s occupation of the Netherlands.

Nearly eight decades later, one of his friends in the battalion is a German whose grandfather was in the SS.
The base in Lohheide is walking distance from Bergen-Belsen, the former Nazi camp where Anne Frank died in 1945. Some buildings on the base were used by the camp toward the end of the war. Today, there are regular visits organized for soldiers.

Some Dutch soldiers recalled being told to avoid World War II jokes before arriving. “Don’t mention the war,” a German major had warned them.

German and Dutch soldiers said they still don’t know if they get to keep the thermal underwear they were assigned for a major NATO exercise in Norway last fall.

Apart from that, the battalion has few complaints. Its fleet of 24 Leopard tanks is set to expand to 44 by year end.
But the soldiers know they are the exception to the rule.

“We are getting priority,” said one of Corporal Berkepeis’s German colleagues, Capt. Frederik Fischer. “If you want a European army, this project cannot fail. If Germany wants to be taken seriously, it cannot fail.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.

[The Lawspeaker]

The aforementioned battalion is part of the first 1st Panzer Division (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Panzer_Division_(Bundeswehr)) of the Bundeswehr which uses both German and Dutch units.

[The Lawspeaker]

I begin to think that it might be a better idea for the Netherlands to bring the whole military under our own control (except for the joint collab with the Benelux countries) and order new tanks by asking the Swedes whether they can update the Stridsvagn 122 to fit our needs as a stop-gap measure before we can start building our own designs again. The Dutch Armed Forces have good experiences with Swedish equipment as it also uses the BV-206 for the Marine Corps and the CV90 (CV9035NL) for the Army. This should make us less reliant on NATO partners and may be a good option if we want to return being a neutral country.

I would therefore suggest scrapping the 1. Dutch/ German Corps and pulling the 43rd Mechanized Brigade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43rd_Mechanized_Brigade_(Netherlands)) from the 1st German Panzer Division and recreate the 1ste Legerkorps (1. Dutch Army Corps) which was dismantled between 1993 and 1995. I think that, during this process, we should recreate the regiments that were disbanded during the 1990s and 2010s: RI's Menno van Coehoorn (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Infanterie_Menno_van_Coehoorn) and Chassé (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Infanterie_Chass%C3%A9) and more importantly: RH (cavalry, hussars) Prins van Oranje (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Huzaren_Prins_van_Oranje), Prins Alexander (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Huzaren_Prins_Alexander), van Sytzama (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Huzaren_van_Sytzama) and van Boreel (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiment_Huzaren_van_Boreel). The 11th Airmobile Brigade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_Airmobile_Brigade_(Netherlands)) should also be pulled from the German Bundeswehr's Division Schnelle Kräfte (Rapid Forces Division) and, if possible, have to exchange their maroon berets for a dark blue one as they could be integrated within the Netherlands Royal Marine Corps.

During the 1980s, the Netherlands had around 900 tanks. I think we should return to that number.

[Autrigón]

An European army with what purpose? To invade who? to defend from who?
Nowadays a good intelligence system and well trained spies are more effective than any tank or plane.

[Westbrook]

The US and French navies have been doing this for a while on a pretty big scale so that French aircraft can use US carriers and vice versa. It's been put in action already during the bombing of ISIS.
We don't need a European Army - but closer integration of both equipment and procedures would work. If we can cut costs by dumping 28 different weapons systems in favour of a joint purchase program, it might be a good idea.

[The Lawspeaker]

An European army with what purpose? To invade who? to defend from who?
Nowadays a good intelligence system and well trained spies are more effective than any tank or plane.

I agree. I think the Netherlands should also invest in strong cyber capabilities but all for home defense.

[Westbrook]

I think tanks are a thing of the past. They'd be so easily destroyed in a real war between two modern militaries.

During the 1980s, the Netherlands had around 900 tanks. I think we should return to that number.

[The Lawspeaker]

I think tanks are a thing of the past. They'd be so easily destroyed in a real war between two modern militaries.

So what would you suggest that the Netherlands would use then ? Maybe since we're a densely populated country, we could invest in greater urban warfare capabilities ?

[Westbrook]

Well who is the enemy you're supposed to be arming against?
So what would you suggest that the Netherlands would use then ? Maybe since we're a densely populated country, we could invest in greater urban warfare capabilities ?

[The Lawspeaker]

Well who is the enemy you're supposed to be arming against?

We're (still) in NATO so technically we're talking about the Russians here. So, yes, I think we should have a large tank force. And the MBT seems to be far (https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/tanks-obsolete-or-every-armys-top-weapon-war-33421) from obsolete.

[Teutone]

https://dirkdeklein.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/8a666eeda2028bc2f315dd780b608ae0.jpg?w=750

[The Lawspeaker]

https://dirkdeklein.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/8a666eeda2028bc2f315dd780b608ae0.jpg?w=750

Maar niet met dit Duitsland.

[Ülev]

ich finde Deutsche und Holländer sollten zusammenhalten denn sie sind sehr nah verwandte Völker :thumb001:

[The Lawspeaker]

ich finde Deutsche und Holländer sollten zusammenhalten denn sie sind sehr nah verwandte Völker :thumb001:

I agree.. totally even. But we also have our own national destiny: we are a mercantile nation, the Germans are not. Mercantile peoples should only maintain an army for their own defence and a strong navy to protect their seaways.

[Westbrook]

You're never going to out-tank Russia though. It would be wiser to invest in helicopters and anti-tank measures. Generally you'll only get 1 advanced helicopter for the same cost as about 5 modern tanks, but think about how much more effective they can be.
We're (still) in NATO so technically we're talking about the Russians here. So, yes, I think we should have a large tank force. And the MBT seems to be far (https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/tanks-obsolete-or-every-armys-top-weapon-war-33421) from obsolete.

[The Lawspeaker]

You're never going to out-tank Russia though. It would be wiser to invest in helicopters and anti-tank measures. Generally you'll only get 1 advanced helicopter for the same cost as about 5 modern tanks, but think about how much more effective they can be.

That would mean that the Air Force needs to be expanded and the infantry needs to be refocused on urban and anti-tank warfare. That should work.

[Westbrook]

The Dutch Army doesn't operate their own helicopters?
That would mean that the Air Force needs to be expanded and the infantry needs to be refocused on urban and anti-tank warfare. That should work.

[The Lawspeaker]

The Dutch Army doesn't operate their own helicopters?

No. That's done by the Air Force here.

[Westbrook]

Oh well, that's what I would do anyway. Choppers also only require a crew of 2 instead of 4 so you wouldn't need to train as many new personnel.
No. That's done by the Air Force here.

[The Lawspeaker]

Oh well, that's what I would do anyway. Choppers also only require a crew of 2 instead of 4 so you wouldn't need to train as many new personnel.

That might actually work. Plus - we should start using fewer types of equipment and try to go as modular as possible. One thing for sure: there should be no conscription. The Netherlands should try to go back to a 1980s size peacetime army of 80.000/90.000 people.

[Blondie]

Ich will kein Klugscheißer sein aber es ist total nervig, wenn hier immer von holländisch oder Holland gesprochen wird. Holland ist nur ein Bundesland der Niederlande. Vielleicht könnt ihr euch das so besser merken: Jeder Bayer ist ein Deutscher, aber nicht jeder Deutsche ist ein Bayer :D

[The Lawspeaker]

Ich will kein Klugscheißer sein aber es ist total nervig, wenn hier immer von holländisch oder Holland gesprochen wird. Holland ist nur ein Bundesland der Niederlande. Vielleicht könnt ihr euch das so besser merken: Jeder Bayer ist ein Deutscher, aber nicht jeder Deutsche ist ein Bayer :D

Provinz. Oder zwei (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noord-Holland) provinzen (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuid-Holland).

[Ülev]

A force of 2.500 German, Dutch and Norwegian troops and 1.000 vehicles is taking part in exercise Noble Jump 2019 at the Zagan training range in Western Poland, whose goal is to test how well different units work together by assembling and deploying them quickly across European borders.
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/natos-spearhead-force-tests-its-readiness-in-poland/
---
https://www.defence24.com/norwegian-telemark-battalion-deployed-to-zagan-poland
---

welcome

https://a.uguu.se/46jPl1lizs2F_noblejump.jpg

[Dandelion]

Ich will kein Klugscheißer sein aber es ist total nervig, wenn hier immer von holländisch oder Holland gesprochen wird. Holland ist nur ein Bundesland der Niederlande. Vielleicht könnt ihr euch das so besser merken: Jeder Bayer ist ein Deutscher, aber nicht jeder Deutsche ist ein Bayer :D

Ich finde es überall total nervig, wenn ein Belgier einen Nederländer wie Holländer nennt.

[Ülev]

^^
Die zogenaamde Nederlander is gewoon een Belg :rolleyes:

[The Lawspeaker]

^^
Die zogenaamde Nederlander is gewoon een Belg :rolleyes:

Vlamingen zijn ook Nederlanders.

[Dandelion]

^^
Die zogenaamde Nederlander is gewoon een Belg :rolleyes:

Binnenkort een Nederbelg. ;)

[Ülev]

Je weet nooit hoe een koe en haas vangt

[The Lawspeaker]

I guess, though, that it would be better to keep much of our military under our own control.