Headline : Anything but routine

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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No. of Paragraph 28

It was arguably the most surprising news to come out of last week’s NATO summit: In four short sentences, the US, together with the German government, announced its intention to station American land-based medium-range missiles in Germany by 2026. The joint declaration reads as concisely as if it were a mere routine act. However, this step will have far-reaching consequences in terms of security policy. It is indicative of the lack of a serious strategic debate in Germany.

The declaration provides for the future deployment of three conventional, land-based systems, so-called stand-off weapons, with ranges of over 2 500 km in some cases: land-based Tomahawk cruise missiles (Typhon weapon system), Standard Missiles 6 (SM-6) in the surface-to-surface missile version and and ‘Dark Eagle’ hypersonic missiles, which are still in the test phase. All three are part of the Multi-Domain Task Force, a military unit structure of the US Army that was introduced in 2017. There are now five such task forces worldwide, all of which are due to be fully operational by 2028. At least three of them are focused on the Pacific region. Since 2021, one has been led out of Germany and serves US operations in Europe and Africa. The task forces integrate land, air, sea, space and cyber forces to flexibly engage enemy targets. The main objective is to overcome so-called anti-access and area denial zones in which the enemy seeks to restrict access and movement.

The German Federal Defence Minister Boris Pistorius considers the deployment of the US systems necessary to ‘close a serious capability gap in Europe’, which has also been identified by the National Security Strategy. The need for medium-range systems also arises from current NATO plans — prioritising such a development for years. Behind this are considerations for deterring Russia, but – and this often remains unacknowledged in public – also for possible warfighting in a crisis. After all, the basis of successful deterrence is always military capabilities that make it possible to threaten and destroy enemy targets in the event of war. At the same time, signalling such consequences is intended to prevent an attack in the first place.

In the event of war, the US stand-off weapons deployed to Germany would probably be used primarily against Russian integrated air defence systems and command and control facilities. For the US, they are an elementary component of a comprehensive warfighting concept that is intended to enable operations across the land, air, sea, space and the cyber domains. This approach is also decisive for NATO: The Alliance’s 2019 military strategy already emphasises horizontal escalation options. According to this strategy, in the event of a Russian attack, a defence should not only be launched directly at the site of the attack, for example in the Baltic states. Instead, NATO is focusing on the possibility of expanding a war geographically to exert pressure elsewhere. Stand-off weapons would provide the necessary flexibility for this.

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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