Germany's Zeitenwende stalled — Sophia Besch on what is missing

Sophia Besch, senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, previously held research positions at the Centre for European Reform in London and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Her 2023-2024 work on German defense policy is the most operationally informed English-language assessment of where the post-2022 Zeitenwende stands.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz's February 27, 2022 Bundestag speech, delivered three days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, made three concrete commitments: a €100 billion special defense fund (Sondervermögen Bundeswehr) for immediate equipment modernization; sustained defense spending at NATO's 2 percent of GDP target; and a substantive reorientation of German foreign and security policy. The speech was treated by international observers as a generational pivot.

Besch's tracking work distinguishes the funding commitment, which has largely been honored, from the operational delivery, which has not. The €100 billion fund is roughly 60 percent drawn-down or contracted by end-2024 by Bundestag budget-committee accounting, with major procurements including the F-35A fighter purchase, the Chinook heavy-lift helicopter order, P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and substantial ammunition stockpile replenishment.

Three structural problems, in Besch's reading, have prevented the funding from producing the transformation the speech implied. First, the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) — the main procurement agency — has not been reformed and its process times have actually lengthened post-2022 as workload grew without staffing growth. Second, the Defense Ministry organogram remains structurally weak in industrial-policy coordination, with no equivalent of the French DGA or US Defense Acquisition Authority capable of running multi-year industrial programs. Third, the post-2022 political coalition's ambivalence about defense as a politically acceptable spending category — the Greens' historical pacifism, the FDP's deficit discipline — left day-to-day political support for the Sondervermögen weaker than the speech implied.

The 2025 question is what happens when the special fund is exhausted, around 2027 on current drawdown rates. Without sustained higher defense spending in the regular federal budget — under a constitutional debt brake that requires either reform or workaround — Germany's defense spending drops below 2 percent of GDP. Besch's argument is that the Zeitenwende has bought modernization in equipment terms but has not yet produced the political-institutional reform needed to sustain it. The next federal government inherits that gap.

­Sophia Besch, senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and previously a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London, has produced the most detailed running account of Germany's Zeitenwende — the strategic turning point that Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in his February 2022 Bundestag speech in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Besch's analysis combines a defence-industrial expertise developed across her CER years with the political-economy framework for understanding why announced strategic shifts often fail to operationalise at the expected pace.

The headline commitment of the February 2022 speech was the establishment of a €100 billion special defence fund — the Sondervermögen — to be drawn down over the subsequent years to address the most acute deficiencies in the Bundeswehr's equipment, readiness, and capability stocks. The speech also committed Germany to meeting the NATO 2% defence-spending target sustainably from 2024 onward. Both commitments have been formally met in the budgetary sense; both have proved more complicated to operationalise than the rhetoric suggested.

The Sondervermögen execution data, drawn from Bundestag budget-committee oversight and Defence Ministry reporting, shows that by end-2024 approximately 60% of the €100 billion had been contractually committed and a smaller fraction had been disbursed against deliveries. The procurement programmes that account for the largest individual allocations — F-35A combat aircraft, P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, Lockheed Martin PAC-3 Patriot air-defence missiles, the Israeli Arrow 3 long-range missile-defence system, Eurofighter Tranche 5 fighters, A400M transport aircraft, Boxer and Puma armoured vehicles — are at varying stages of contract negotiation, production, and delivery. Most will deliver capability across the late 2020s and into the 2030s rather than producing immediate readiness improvements.

The Besch framework identifies three structural reasons that the Zeitenwende has translated more slowly into capability than the speech implied. First, the procurement system that the Bundeswehr operates within — the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology, and In-Service Support, known as BAAINBw — was not designed for the rapid-acquisition profile that the Sondervermögen required, and the reform of BAAINBw's processes has lagged the spending decisions. Second, the German defence industrial base has limited surge capacity in many of the key product categories, and ramping production to higher volumes runs into supply-chain constraints and workforce constraints that take years to address. Third, the broader political culture around defence as a domestically legitimate industrial activity has shifted more slowly than the formal rhetoric, with implications for permitting, workforce recruitment, and the political economy of large defence contracts.

The institutional reform track has been pursued under successive Defence Ministers — Christine Lambrecht resigned in January 2023 after multiple political controversies; Boris Pistorius succeeded her in January 2023 and has been the most effective political champion of the broader Zeitenwende agenda. The October 2023 Bundeswehr Common Roof reform package, advanced under Pistorius, addressed specific procurement-process bottlenecks. The 2024 update to the National Security Strategy and the implementation of the Operative Leitlinien für die Streitkräfte (Operational Guidelines for the Armed Forces) have provided the doctrinal framework that the post-Zeitenwende Bundeswehr is rebuilding toward.

The 2% spending question is the most-watched political metric. Germany formally reached 2% in 2024 by including the Sondervermögen disbursements in the topline number. The 2027 question — whether German defence spending remains at 2% once the Sondervermögen is exhausted, requiring the underlying federal budget to absorb the increased baseline — is the structural fiscal challenge that the broader German political economy will have to address. The Schuldenbremse (constitutional debt brake) imposes limits on the budgetary space available; the political coalitions required to either revise the debt brake or to substitute lower priority spending are not yet in place. The Zeitenwende's durability past 2027 is therefore a function of political-economic choices that are being deferred rather than resolved.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.