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German Defence And Armed Drones Within The Context Of The Wider Invasion of Ukraine: An Interview With Dr Ulrike Franke
I spoke to Dr Franke to try and get an understanding of how Germany has changed on the 'Armed Drone Debate', defence and what relation this has to the wider invasion of Ukraine.
Alec: I am with Dr Ulrike Franke, a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. It is safe to say you (referring to Dr Franke) are an expert on all things drone and German defence policy. These are dynamic and essential topics to follow presently. I am speaking to her to discuss the discourse on armed drones and defence within Germany in light of the broader invasion of Ukraine.
I’ll start by asking about what set off the modern debate on Germany’s procurement of armed drones in 2012, which is the statement of the then Federal Defence Minister regarding armed drones and the importance of procuring them within the context of bolstering the Bundeswehr’s military capabilities to conduct counter-insurgency operations (COIN). Could you summarise what went around the German drone debate, what happened to it and whether this debate went anywhere in the end?
Dr Franke: Ha, to summarise the German Drone debate, now that’s fun! I’m sarcastic, of course, because this discussion has been going on for so long. As you rightly pointed out this debate in earnest happened in 2012 when then-German Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière proposed that Germany should acquire Armed Drones for the Bundeswehr. There had been a few discussions beforehand because the Bundeswehr’s officials had previously discussed the topic. Don’t forget this was at the height of the focus on armed drones because the United States was using armed drones in not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but most importantly in Pakistan (amongst other places). Therefore there was quite a lot of focus on these systems since the early 2010s.
The German Defense Minister proposed that in 2012, Germany should acquire these Drones, and over the next 10 years Germany discussed whether that was a good idea. That this became such a heated discussion was striking insofar that German society does not tend to discuss issues of security and defence policy in any detail. For 10 years we (which will be used to frequently refer to Germany as this is where Dr Franke is from) kind of had a back-and-forth. Actually no that’s not even true, we didn’t even have back and forth between those in favour and those against the idea, because the discussion was mainly dominated by those who felt that acquiring armed drones for Germany would be a bad idea, that armed drones were kind of bad technology, to begin with, and that we shouldn’t get this.
As I demonstrated in my PhD thesis (which Dr Franke completed on the topic of UAVs at Oxford University), those opposed to the procurement of armed UAVs dominated the debate, while the German military provided little information about why it desired these systems. So for 10 years, this discussion continued to turn around and around, lasting through several governments. There were two moments where the government agreed on acquiring them, then, in the last meeting of the Parliamentary Budgetary Committee, one of the coalition partners, the Social Democrats, SPD (which are now leading the current coalition) withdrew support for acquiring them. They argued that there hadn’t been enough of a debate. Twice.
Alec: So this is what I wanted to ask. I thought this issue was resolved in the end. I believe the Luftwaffe currently uses the Heron TP drones, which they are leasing hours for since Germany does not own them outright. Were they also supposed to be a placeholder for the Euro Hawk drones?
Dr Franke: Not quite. The Bundeswehr has had drones for decades, it’s been using drones since the 1980s, unarmed drones for surveillance. So when the Bundeswehr was operating in Afghanistan, over time, they acquired five different types of drone systems to fly in Afghanistan and did so with quite a lot of success. They were useful militarily, but these were surveillance systems and mainly army systems. Germany then acquired Heron 1 UAVs, leasing them per flight hour from Israel. They then decided to scale up to the Heron TP system, a bigger system for the Luftwaffe. Germany already has these drones today and is training soldiers on how to use them. But the Heron TP can be armed. It doesn’t have to be but, it can. They decided to lease the Heron TP UAVs – exactly because they could be armed - but pushed the decision to arm them to later because they could not agree on it. And now, with the Zeitenwende and the Ukraine war, we (Germany) are arming these drones.
The thing I would like to point out is that this debate was not a great moment for German Security and Defense Policy. It is also striking that we are talking about a relatively small number of armed systems, the lease of only five armed drones. Just to give some context, in the time that we discussed these five drones, Turkey managed to build its whole drone sector and built hundreds of drones, many of which it exported.
And on your question regarding the Eurohawk and Heron TP being a placeholder: the Heron TP is supposed to be an interim solution until we get the Euro Drone (not the Eurohawk, which is a surveillance system that was cancelled a few years ago). The Euro Drone is a system that Germany is developing with other European nations and is kind of the European MQ-Reaper or something like that. This system's development has been stalled for quite some time due to a lack of political will to push this process forward. So yes, in theory, the Heron TP is an interim solution. But with military equipment, “interim” can mean decades.
Alec: So I think I got confused with the Euro Hawk being discontinued at some point, but the Euro Drone was supposed to replace the leased Heron TP drones. As you also mentioned, a relatively small number of drones is being discussed. According to what I recall reading in April of this year, only 140 rounds were purchased for these drones, 80 for operational use and 60 for training. So it seems like there was a lot of debate around something that would constitute a relatively small part of the German defence arsenal.
There have been a lot of debates about Germany and what is exactly going on within it concerning the various defence policy debates that have taken place there. Would you say there is a culture of kicking the can down the road or a normative rebuke of war? What is exactly driving this? Some could call it hubris or indecision within Germany; is that fair?
Dr Franke: So it is a mix of those things. German society indeed has, in the broader sense both publicly and militarily, a difficult relationship with the military. I wouldn’t call it a pacificist society but a society that has a negative view of all things military. The problem quite often is not a very coherent or thought-through position concerning the role of the military, but more an issue of feeling that "we don’t like anything related to the military," "military means war and war is bad and therefore we don’t talk about it," "we don’t want to spend any money on it," "we don’t want to think about it,". Therefore anyone arguing for a well-equipped Bundeswehr is a warmonger. This was the situation before the war in Ukraine. This made talking about all things military quite difficult.
The drone debate was particularly difficult for several reasons. For one, UAVs and armed UAVs were very much associated within Germany with the way the United States used armed UAVs. Namely, the way the US used them in states it was not at war with, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. These attacks as I am sure you know are considered to be illegal by many, so there were a lot of discussions around collateral damage and this, therefore, armed UAVs had a very bad reputation in Germany. So a lot of people in Germany equated Armed Drones with these policies and decided we don’t want armed drones because we don’t want to wage war on Pakistani wedding parties and things like that. This of course makes little sense because it is not about the tool but about the policy on how to use the tool, and the Bundeswehr is not the US military or the CIA. The focus on the US was one big issue.
The second issue has been and continues to be that many people do not understand what systems are being discussed when it comes to armed UAVs. As such drones get equated with science fiction, fully autonomous technology and something out of ‘The Terminator’. So a lot of people were effectively arguing about autonomy in warfare and autonomous killer robots, which you can do, but this has nothing to do with the remotely piloted Heron TP systems. Even at the political level, people were making arguments against the Heron TP that were not arguments against the Heron TP.
Then you had the kind of general problem that modern Germany does not have a tradition of talking about military and defence topics in general, so the moment we did this with drones other issues surrounding the topic were lumped in. I experienced this so often when I was giving public lectures on these things and at the end of them, we would not even be discussing armed drones but discussing things like ‘why do we even need the Bundeswehr’ and ‘what are we doing in Afghanistan’. This makes discussing a single issue difficult when you get all these fundamental discussions lumped in.
Finally, because you mentioned the Euro Hawk, we also had a very unfortunate development where Germany was trying to acquire surveillance drones from the United States, the Global Hawk, which is the biggest surveillance drone in the world and rebuild them into a German version of this called the Euro Hawk. This acquisition failed quite dramatically after Germany spent over half a billion euros on it. This is a bad thing but these things happen and this was nothing inherent to drones as Germany had issues with the acquisition scandals and problems with the procurement of all kinds of other military equipment. But it contributed to giving drones a bad name.
So this all together meant that there was a perfect storm around armed drones, and this made the discussion around them extremely difficult within Germany. Those in favour of getting them on the political and military level took a long time before they confidently stood up and said ‘we are going to make the argument in favour of getting these systems’. There was the so-called Drone Debate 2020, which the German Ministry of Defense kind of pushed to the forefront and where the Defence minister became more outspoken on the matter of arming these drones. Interestingly, the then-Defense Minister Von Der Leyen refused to be photographed with a drone in Afghanistan because it was deemed politically toxic to be photographed in front of one.
Alec: It appears that there was a lot of concern about optics, ethics, and the procurement of armed drones in Germany and that these conversations often became very abstract because other things were thrown into them, such as autonomous killing machines, the "gamification of murder," and similar debates. When I was an undergrad and postgrad, I noticed in academia that ethics and legality debates dominated the literature and that the focus was predominantly on the United States and its use of armed UAVs.
Dr Franke: Exactly. I think this is the bigger problem in a way because I am not saying that there is no point in discussing these issues. But first of all, we talked about this 10 years in Germany. I think that few people in the world are as willing to discuss this topic as I am, but even I am saying that you don’t need 10 years to discuss the matter. So we spent too much time on this debate. Even worse, most of the time we had the wrong focus and repeated the same thing, but we rarely, until the end, looked at how all of this works for the Bundeswehr because the whole point of this is that Germany is buying these armed drones. What the Bundeswehr will do with these systems should have been the focus.
Of course, certain legal questions need to be answered, and concerns around the gamification of war and PTSD for operators need to be addressed. This was almost not done at all or only done at the very end, all while repetitive comments about how "drones cause so many collateral deaths" and "we don’t want to go to war with Pakistan" were made, which had nothing to do with the Armed Drone debate in the context of the Bundeswehr procuring them.
Alec: That is the other thing I noticed is that the number of drones we are talking about is so small compared to the large amount that the CIA operates for assassination missions. I would think for Germany which would be procuring such a small amount of Armed UAVs, there would be an aversion to losing them and therefore sending them out on assassination missions in faraway countries would not logically make any sense.
Dr Franke: Germany also could not legally use them this way. Any use of military power needs to be authorised by the German parliament. It is absurd to assume that just because Germany gets drones, the German Parliament would change its whole approach to military operations and start waging war around the world. I remember that you just asked about the arming of the Heron TP systems. I think what we’ve also seen and are now aware of — though this was not much of a secret — is that the Bundeswehr was not well-equipped, to begin with. As such, Germany has a problem with ammunition because it hasn’t bought enough ammunition for many decades, since it did not expect to ever have to use it in large quantities. So there’s also a limited amount of ammunition being procured for these systems too, which is not exactly surprising.
It is worth mentioning that initially, the idea was that these drones were bought for Afghanistan, but the Afghanistan mission has long ended and the Mali mission is ending soon. So the question is, what exactly is Germany buying them for, and how much are we going to buy now, even though we are not involved in any missions where we immediately need them now?
Alec: That’s a lovely transition to what I was going to ask about next. I wanted to move away from just the armed drone debates and instead look at the implications of the debate and the invasion of Ukraine on the German force structure and military more broadly. You mentioned a few points about ammunition and the industrial capacity for producing this ammunition.
Looking at Ukraine now, a lot of Western states have realised that in a conventional interstate war, you burn through a lot of ammunition and greatly overlooked this. This may be due to the West's recent emphasis on preparing its forces for counterinsurgency operations. Western states (particularly Western European ones) have also realised that although specialised capabilities are great, quantity has a quality of its own.
As a result, I am worried about some Western countries that have thought about replacing manned combat aircraft with unmanned aerial vehicles. Do you think it's likely that Germany will begin using unmanned aerial vehicles to minimise costs and make up for a lack of combat aircraft?
Dr Franke: This is not something I am immediately concerned with. Mainly because Germany lacks capabilities everywhere because the Bundeswehr has been so underfunded for the last few decades, Germany would need to scale up capabilities almost everywhere. The €100 billion special fund put up recently to reequip the Bundeswehr has focused quite a bit on aerial capabilities. Most prominently, Germany is buying the F-35 from the US whilst also spending over €100 million on the F-CAS development programme alongside France, which will be a manned fighter component. Given how drones are not loved in the German political realm, I do not think that there is any risk of drones being procured instead of manned systems. Are we procuring enough systems? Most military people would tell you no but they would also tell you that Germany is not procuring enough frigates, submarines, or other capabilities.
It is worth noting that there has been so much time invested in the discussion around the Heron TP drones, that we will need to soon start discussing the Euro Drone. I am not sure what has become of the Euro Drone, its development has been so long that it has had several different names already. The last thing I read about was the incredibly high cost of the Euro Drone, which as you mentioned can be an issue because the costlier they are the less willing you are to use them, which negates the whole point of having UAVs in your arsenal in the first place. So the progress of the journey of the Euro Drone’s development is unclear, but in the future, we will have to discuss how many of them Germany is going to buy.
Alec: It is extremely interesting to know where German capabilities may be heading in the near future. So there has been a lot of confusion about how much is being spent on defence by Germany. So there was a big announcement of €100 billion for a special fund for the Bundeswehr in general. There have also been recent articles about Germany not allocating much more than 2% of its GDP to defence, as is supposed to be the goal for NATO states. I’ve even read one of your tweets which mentioned that Germany has not really begun to seriously upscale its artillery system and artillery ammunition production despite its artillery stocks being quite depleted due to all the assistance sent to Ukraine. So what is exactly going on?
Dr Franke: The German Defense budget has been below the 2% NATO goal for the last decades. Germany has been spending somewhere around 1.3% to 1.5% around the last 10 years depending on how you calculate it. German governments have always said they were trying to reach the 2% target, but they never really made an effort to meet it. On the 24th of February, Russia invaded Ukraine and then on the 27th of February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a big speech in the German parliament announcing two important things in the context of defence. Firstly, he said that Germany would allot €100 billion to a special fund for the Bundeswehr. It is categorised as a special fund because Germany is not supposed to take on new debt and by assigning this status to the fund, Germany would be able to get around these rules to fund the acquisition of capabilities for the Bundeswehr.
The second important mentioned in the speech is that Germany would meet or even exceed the NATO 2% GDP allocation goal for Defense. There was a bit of confusion as to whether Germany would meet the 2% and then also spend $100 billion on top of that, or if the $100 billion was counted in with the funds necessary to meet the 2%. The idea is to have $100 billion as a package now to add to the defence budget over the next 5 years to reach the 2% and then the budget itself would need to be at 2% afterwards. Importantly, it means Germany is spending more on defence than it would before the war in Ukraine.
There are two issues to point out here though. This was all announced on the 27th of February. It took until June for the German Parliament to vote on the special fund because of the need to secure majority support. In October, The Court of Audit notified the German Parliament that the list of the capabilities it desired to procure was too long, and would not be covered by $100 billion. This was corrected by removing a few items. Then in November, the German Parliamentary Committee followed through on the decision. Finally, on December 14th the Budgetary Committee of the Bundestag decided to spend the first euros from this special fund.
So it took 10 months to go from the decision to the actual money being spent. That is peacetime speed. In times of peace, a year between deciding to spend money and spending it is acceptable though not ideal. But taking this long during wartime is not good at all. It seemed that a week after the announcement on the 27th of February, Germany fell back into a peacetime mode of thinking and speed in acquisition. But at least money finally started being spent on December 14th for the procurement of new rifles for the Bundeswehr and F-35s.
The second issue is that when you looked at the list of what the €100 billion was being spent on, which is publicly available, a lot of the things on this list were things that Germany had promised to spend in the past within its normal defence budget in previous years. It just shows you that there was an issue with Germany not spending enough money on the Bundeswehr and kept having these long lists of things being needed capability-wise but didn’t allocate money for the in the past. Without being overly cynical, it appears that this conflict saved the Bundeswehr by finally allocating enough funds to purchase the items that had been promised to be purchased in the past and were required. In light of this, it is unclear how this equipment could have been purchased without the $100 billion allocated in response to the conflict in Ukraine.
Alec: So do you think this culture of kicking the can down the road, delaying things, deliberating and then deliberating again, is finally over? Are you more optimistic now?
Dr Franke: Yes and no. The kicking the can down the road is still happening, and no one wants to take on responsibility for bolder decisions. Without entering the F-35 discussion too much, it was well known that Germany needed a successor to the Tornado to keep being a part of NATO nuclear sharing and consecutive governments just kept not making decisions until the very last moment. There was a real possibility that Germany would have stumbled out of NATO’s nuclear sharing because we could not decide to buy an aircraft, which is really not acceptable for a country such as Germany. In some way, this is kind of ingrained, this culture will not change from one day to another.
I do believe the Ukraine war and the Zeitenwende have changed quite a bit, at least in the political debate. You have quite left-wing green politicians in Parliament who can rattle off a list of weapon systems that I am sure they had not known a year ago. So there is a change. However, as I was saying with the €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr, Germany kind of fell back into the peacetime bureaucracy very quickly, so more needs to be done. It is, therefore, a glass-half-full kind of thing. People look from the outside at Germany and ask ‘what are you guys doing?’ and I get this to some extent, but seeing this from the inside, there have been quite a few changes. Including, by the way, delivering weapon systems to Ukraine, a country at war.
You may say of course this is something that needed to be done, but it is a big break for Germany and its defence policy. So we need to see how this develops. Chancellor Scholz says Germany needs a new strategic culture, which is quite a bold claim because you don’t change something like that quickly or from the top down and parliamentary decisions. But maybe the fact Germany is discussing defence so much more will change things a bit.
Just a final thought: I’ve experienced this change personally. There’s so much more interest in defence topics within Germany, and not just in the invasion of Ukraine. I see this on the German language podcast I do on defence and security (called “Sicherheitshalber”); there, interest has gone up massively. I also see this insofar as, when in the past I talked about defence and security policy on German television, I always got a bunch of emails about how this was militaristic, warmongering, and asking me whether I did not have grandparents who experienced World War Two. This has changed substantially since people seem to have realised now that military capabilities are not just inherently evil.