German Air Force Chief's Inflammatory Remarks Spark Controversy

Remember Taurusgate? When several German officers, including its former air force head, were caught making insane and childish plans for plastering Russia with German missiles but from Ukraine?

That and the amateurish manner in which these grand strategists in prankster mode let themselves be caught were daft as well as sadly comical. But lessons have not been learned, even if the German Air Force is now under new management.

Recently, its new commander-in-chief gave a combative and intriguingly ill-considered, even jejune interview. Speaking to Britain’s Telegraph, General Holger Neumann released several inflammatory statements. The one that has found most attention was his proud claim that his pilots stand ready not merely to fight Russia at a moment’s notice, but to strike with immediate, large-scale, and – he assumes with that special German military optimism some call fatal arrogance – devastating operations.

Neumann, who has a Lego model of Luke Skywalker’s helmet in his office and has admitted that Star Wars was among the things that made him want to be a fighter pilot, is likely to fantasize about taking out a Death Star or two singlehandedly. But stuck in the real world, his dream targets, he let the Telegraph readers know, include the Black Sea area, the Kola Peninsula, the Kaliningrad exclave, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. That is, places whose military and political importance would make rapid and severe Russian retaliation inevitable.

Neumann did hedge a little: Before presenting his brilliant idea for taking Germany from initial hostilities – however remote (say, in Estonia), however small (“every inch,” in former US President Joe Biden’s, words which Neumann parroted) – to total, possibly nuclear, war in the blink of an eye, the air force chief offered the usual disclaimer: All of this would only happen in case of a Russian attack on NATO.

It is hard to imagine anyone naive enough to fall for that rhetorical device and feel reassured. For several reasons: Generally speaking, ‘all we want is to defend ourselves and keep others from attacking us, just trust us’ has been the favorite line of every single warmonger since the dawn of times. Regarding German history, the two world wars that Germany managed to start within less than three decades were also preceded by copious assurances of this sort.

And as we learn in political science or international relations 101 – except wherever they train Germany’s top brass – there is also such a thing as a security dilemma: What one side may feel is merely arming itself for defense, its potential opponent may easily perceive as preparations for attack. But in this regard, let’s not blame Neumann individually: The obstinate refusal to see one’s own near-hysterical and also ruinous armament drive from the other side’s point of view is not one German officer’s bug but a Berlin feature now.

More specifically, Neumann went out of his way to make his input as reckless and incendiary as he possibly could. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine the head of the German air force had said something simple and perfectly sufficient, such as “Germany is a member of NATO, and the German air force stands ready to fulfill our obligations toward our allies.”

Hearing this statement, you may well disagree or even be dismayed. I, for one, believe it’s high time Germany left NATO. NATO, after all, is an organization dominated by the US, while the latter is both rabidly aggressive (see under ‘Iran’) and in obvious decline (see also under ‘Iran’). Quite apart from the fact that it was NATO’s predictably explosive and unnecessary expansion that provoked the Ukraine conflict and the not-really-minor detail that Berlin’s NATO ‘allies’ blow up German infrastructure with the help of Ukrainian terrorist commandos.

Yet the real problem with Neumann’s statement, what makes it truly disturbing, is its excessiveness. A German officer saying Germany would fulfil existing obligations? Even if you don’t like those – NATO – obligations, that’s no biggie, really. Indeed, that would be a military officer staying in his lane and leaving politics to the politicians.

But Neumann did so much more and worse: For starters, despite widespread misunderstandings, the NATO treaty, in particular its famous Article 5 does not foresee anything like the insane hair-trigger response Neumann considers natural. What Article 5 does say is, in essence, that all NATO members will consider an armed attack on one of them as an attack on all, and that they will then decide which actions they – and clearly each one of them individually – “deem necessary” to assist the attacked. Among those actions, military force is one option, but it is not automatic, the default, or prescribed as the only permitted response.

Understanding the treaty as actually written and signed does not mean to be naive: Of course, NATO’s planning is all geared toward fighting. But it remains a fact that even this single-mindedness has a flimsier basis in the treaty than many realize.

Things get worse for Neumann once we set aside the fact that there is no military automatism in the NATO treaty. Let’s assume a conflict has started and a military option is what is desired, rightly or, much more likely, wrongly. Then the pertinent questions for responsible adults would be what kind of action, on what scale, to what precise purpose at that specific moment? Last but not least, are there limited military options that preserve the possibility of turning to negotiations quickly?

Yet where others would be careful not to rush up what is often called the ‘escalation ladder’ and would really be, in this case, a nuclear death spiral, Germany’s top air force officer can’t wait to reach the end or be bothered to take a breather to think.

Instead, Neumann is proud to be ready to “fight tonight” (a daft, embarrassing slogan currently in fashion among NATO’s Germans) with “everything we have.” In other words, all-in from the get-go; from 0 to 100 in one second; from very-bad-already to irreversible catastrophe, indeed possible annihilation faster than you can say ‘jawohl!’ This kind of talk betrays an insane, reckless eagerness and great immaturity. And not only that of Neumann but of his boss, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, official Berlin, and all too many in NATO-EU Europe’s elites as well.

Neumann’s lack of circumspection – to put it mildly – was also reflected in his choosing the eve of the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union to speak his one-track mind. Or was that shameful timing deliberate? All the worse again in that case.

Unfortunately, Neumann represents the current German leadership and media mainstream, politically and psychologically, in its shortsightedness, belligerence, and what appears to be sheer hatred of Russia.

Witness the recent picture gloatingly shared by Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov: It shows Pistorius benevolently looking at Federov’s cell phone, where the latter proudly claims to be showing off the results of recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow. Russia and Ukraine are at war. Why a German defense minister is making a face like a provincial schoolmaster approving of the latest efforts of his pet pupil is a mystery, as well as how that defense minister is imagining future relations with Russia. But then, Pistorius may only be interested in one kind anyway: Ever more open conflict.

The obvious question must be asked: Has the Ukraine conflict become a pretext for those German politicians and military officers who want, consciously or not, revenge for being beaten so badly in 1945?

Not all is gloom. There also is open resistance to Neumann’s intervention and the high-risk-low-reflection militarism it stands for. In party politics, that opposition comes from the left and right challengers to Germany’s version of ‘radical Centrism’. On the left, one of the BSW’s (Buendnis Sarah Wagenknecht) foreign policy heavyweights has led the charge. On the right, one of the co-leaders of the AfD party has sharply criticized Neumann’s “war threats” and called on Pistorius to distance himself from them. Consider that the AfD is leading in the polls, while it is extremely probable that the BSW is not currently in the Bundestag parliament only because of a series of highly suspicious ‘miscounts’ and it is clear that their objections matter and will matter even more.

Importantly, some former high-ranking officers are also publicly contradicting the gung-ho course. The former head of the German Navy, Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach – axed four years ago over heretically sensible statements about Russia – has called for restoring diplomacy and warned that Germany could end up sleepwalking into a conflict.

Yet for now, Germany is stuck with its new militarism. For how much longer – that is a question that may turn out to be vital for the nation.