The Case for European Defence

Germany had a rough year, morally speaking. We shut down our last nuclear reactors only to promptly import dirty coal to replace Putin's gas. And, while struggling with anything that reminds us of our militaristic history, we reluctantly became the biggest supplier of weaponry to Ukraine on the continent (except from Russia, one could argue).

This raises the question of how we should think about German and European defence strategy when we have industrial warfare back in Europe. It's a difficult topic, that I'm slightly afraid to touch. Not only because I'm still working out my opinion on it and this blog post is part of that. But also because it's not as "feel good" as saying let's skip school on Fridays to fight climate change. It feels terrible to say we have to build more tanks so Kiev doesn't get overrun in the coming years.

And by providing weapons and support to Ukraine, are we not prolonging a conflict that is reminiscent more of a civil war than a campaign of territorial conquest?

This is an argument thats making the rounds on Twitter again. I believe it can be made from a place of compassion, to try to stop the growing number of casualties at all costs, although it often isn't. Unfortunately it is inherently misguided. Assuming a single round game, this approach could work if willing to accept the occupation and "denazification" (at this point we don't have to imagine how this would look like) of a free country. But this is not a single round game - what would come after Ukraine? What would that mean for the Baltics, for Taiwan? It certainly would bring the war even closer to NATO borders and increase the risk of a nuclear exchange. The best place to stand up to Russia would have been in 2014. The second best place is now.

It is surprisingly easy to become used to a Twitter (or news) feed of flying tank turrets and drone-eye views of infantry assaults. It's surprisingly easy to be used to war in Europe again.

The only lesson I can draw from that is that it's time to be more serious about foreign policy. Europe can't allow itself to be distracted by cookie banners anymore. We can't do obviously stupid moves like shutting down nuclear reactors we urgently need during a geopolitical crisis just to adhere to dogma. We can't continue to outsource critical technology to China. Let's do less unforced errors. And let's stop being naive about strategy.

Strategic naivety

Germany's east strategy of fostering economic ties to increase regional stability and peace was not wrong on principle. The old adage that countries that trade don't fight works more often than not. The fatal flaw was to confuse relationships with dependencies. By selling out critical infrastructure and becoming reliant on a single provider of natural resources, we gave Putin the cards he needed to become more aggressive. By normalising corruption, and, lets call it what it is when the head of state of a country becomes a member of the board of directors of THE strategic state-owned company of the geopolitical adversary of that country: treason, we gave Putin the chance to play these cards.

He overplayed them, underestimating Europes will to stand up for Ukraine and, most importantly, the strength of the Ukrainians. But he played them nonetheless. And now we have the "meat grinder going rampant" as podcaster Dan Carlin would call it, with the monthly casualty numbers of industrial warfare stacking up and no end in sight. To be clear, this is not the West's fault. It's Putin's. But I wonder how much suffering a more serious strategy could have avoided.

Make friends, not war

Ok so we made huge unforced errors. But what should we do? Let's start simple. If there is one lesson that that a strategist could learn from the world wars, it's that the bigger alliance won and the side that started the war lost. Pretty obvious but lets formalise that:

Don't start wars
Make friends

American theorist and fighter pilot Col. John Boyd put it a bit more succinctly:

Grand strategy: Shape pursuit of national goal so that we not only amplify our spirit and strength (while undermining and isolating our adversaries) but also influence the uncommitted or potential adversaries so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

Strategic aim: Diminish adversary's capacity while improving our capacity to adapt as an organic whole, so that our adversary cannot cope—while we can cope—with events/efforts as they unfold.

Europe has actually been quite good at this! The EU and NATO as concepts have probably never received this much love - with both Finland and Sweden joining the alliance, and a whole bottom-up, online communities (NAFO) committed to fighting Russian propaganda with memes.

Make friends, don't start wars *but prepare for combat

Now, these first two rules are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. On their own, they are not a defence strategy. And thats what Europe has been missing: a focus on actually being able to defend itself. What does this entail? I think we can narrow it down by drawing on Boyd again: Strategy is about organising people, ideas and technology in an effective way (military people like to call this lethality) to achieve some goal. In our case that goal is collective defence. Let's look at each of those parts.

Especially Germany has relied on the Pax Americana after the cold war. Today, Germany's armed forces are widely considered to be completely unprepared for large scale operations, terribly equipped and understaffed. To meet Nato demands for high-readiness task forces, we cannibalised whole divisions to staff and equip a few brigades. Some of the reasons for that are obvious: To collect our "peace dividend", we cut unpopular defence spending. And probably more damaging, let bureaucratic procurement processes make effective and future-oriented buying decisions almost impossible. Spending is easy to increase, procurement is hard to get right.

But there is also the fact that Germany struggles with placing its soldiers in the middle of society. Rightfully, we struggle with how to approach military affairs. But especially given our past, it's crucial to anchor our armed forces in the democratic centre. This means working hard to sort out extremists and creating incentives to attract the right people. But it also requires a change of public opinion, more so on the left, to not automatically treat any soldier with suspicion.

Countries like the US and Israel are able to attract a portion of their "best and brightest" to military academies. In Germany, I don't see this being the case at all. The Bundeswehr is not attractive for top talent and this is its biggest issue.

The most (socially) contrarian decision I made in my life so far, was to join the army for voluntary conscription after high school. As a left-leaning person with a left-leaning circle, most of my friends and family were at least freaked out a little bit by that. I decided against a career in the medical corps pretty quickly and went off to civilian university instead but I still value the experience. What stayed with me though was the impression that we weren't being fair to our troops. If as a society we ask young people to risk their lives for us, then the least we can do is provide them with the best training and best tools for the job. Currently, we are not.

Any defence strategy going forward will have to get these fundamentals right: people, ideas and technology. Or put another way: talent acquisition, R&D and procurement.

The Anduril way

I don't know how to fix defence procurement. Startup principles are hard to apply when dealing with high-risk technology on the one side and multi-year sales processes with government buyers on the other.

The standard procedure now seems to be that the a government buyer requests proposals for a certain product (for example a new drone) and the industry replies with proposals. These proposals include certain deadlines and budgets to be competitive during evaluation. Unsurprisingly, once a project is selected, it tends to be over budget and behind schedule. Fast forward this process over many iterations and increasingly complex tech, and weapon systems become so expensive that even the richest countries can order only a few of them (F-35s for example; also worthwhile to read the Defence Death Spiral). It's great to have the best technology. But quantity has a quality of its own. At what point is it better to have X times more of a technologically inferior system? I'm sure US Navy ships are better than PLAN (Chinese Liberation Army Navy) ships. But it seems that China will simply soon have many, many more ships. In the same way, one runs into problems, like in the sky over Ukraine, when shooting down drones that costs a few thousand dollars with anti-aircraft missiles at the price point of up to a million each. So we need to think about how to get more "advanced enough" technology, at scale.

With US defence startup Anduril, a new way emerged: self-fund development of iteratively more complex technology and offer it off the shelf to governments. They started with building base protection systems, expanded into drones and counter-drones and are now building submersibles too - all tied together via a software platform and AI. Especially for technology that is advancing at a geometric rate, like AI and drones, this approach might be a necessity to keep up the Wests technological advantage.

Defence is seeing a small resurgence, with a few startups, like Anduril and ModernIntelligence in the US as well as Helsing and Lambda Automata in Europe pushing "DefenceTech" forward. The field is getting more interest from VCs than at any point in the last decade. And I like how Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe commented on what he saw when visiting troops: "If I were (an enemy) mole in the Pentagon, instead of stealing anything that you guys are developing, I would make sure that you did nothing to your systems - because they're that bad". So in startup speak: "there is a pain point".

Ultimately though, defence stays a tough subject. Which probably is a good thing: we want to make sure we are critical of who builds our weapons and how they do it. Scrutiny is more than justified. But if we want to keep a technological edge, for example to help Ukraine, then we also want really smart people with a strong moral compass working on it.