Perspectives: The Case for Berlin
The German Zeitenwende is delivering. The last problem is speed.
A view from Berlin Mitte.
Poland will field more modern tanks than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined by 2030. That sentence has become the default indictment of Berlin's defence transformation. It shouldn't be.
The comparison flatters a narrative — Warsaw acts, Berlin dithers, etc pp.
That narrative is satisfying. It is also the wrong critique — and the wrong critique is more dangerous than no critique at all, because it lets Berlin off the hook for the thing it is actually getting wrong.
Poland's armour surge is impressive and necessary, but it is not the benchmark against which Germany's Zeitenwende should be measured.
NATO does not need two Polands. It needs a Poland and a Germany — each doing what the other cannot. The question is whether Germany is doing its part.
This is a case for Berlin, written from Berlin, by analysts who think the Anglophone defence debate is getting this wrong.
(This commentary accompanies our full data profile: Poland's Armour Surge: 900 Tanks, Three Platforms, and the Gap to Berlin. Fleet tables, delivery timelines, and sourcing are there. What follows is assessment.)
What Germany Is Actually Building
Start with what is empirically true, because the "nothing has changed" line is not.
Germany's 2026 defence budget is €108 billion — the largest in Europe in absolute terms. But the number matters less than what it is buying. The Sondervermögen funded 35 F-35s for the nuclear sharing mission and 60 CH-47F Chinooks for heavy-lift. Leopard 2A8 production has restarted — the first new-build German tank since 1992 — with 123 on order and 75 more planned. Twenty Tranche 5 Eurofighters are under contract. Ammunition framework contracts exceed €12 billion across 155mm artillery and 120mm tank rounds. These are the baseline commitments of a serious NATO member — necessary, unremarkable, and largely on track.
What sets the Zeitenwende apart is what comes next.
Between December 2024 and February 2025, BAAINBw signed digitisation framework and procurement contracts totalling more than €9 billion across three interlocking programmes — D-LBO for vehicle command networks, TaWAN LBO for the tactical wide-area backbone, and IdZ-ES for infantry soldier systems. No other European land force has committed to digital C2 integration at this scale.
Arrow 3 procurement under the European Sky Shield Initiative gives Germany the opening layers of a ballistic missile defence capability that no other European nation outside the UK possesses. IRIS-T SLM batteries — with a 90%+ interception rate demonstrated in Ukrainian service — are entering Bundeswehr inventory while simultaneously proving themselves in the most demanding operational environment on the continent.
Twenty-four nations now participate in the German-led ESSI — the largest joint air defence procurement initiative in NATO's history, with acquisition channelled through Germany's BAAINBw. Germany hosts more of NATO's air command infrastructure than any other ally: Allied Air Command at Ramstein and the Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem, which controls air policing across all European NATO airspace north of the Alps. No other European state is simultaneously leading a continent-wide procurement framework, hosting the alliance's principal air command architecture, and fielding Arrow 3 ballistic missile defence capability.
And then there is Lithuania. Panzerbrigade 45 "Litauen" was formally stood up in May 2025 — the first German brigade-sized unit to be based abroad permanently since World War II. As of 4 February 2026, the brigade commands three combat formations: Panzerbataillon 203, Panzergrenadierbataillon 122, and the Multinational Battlegroup Lithuania — some 500 allied troops alongside German personnel — transferred from NATO's enhanced Forward Presence into German brigade command, bringing the brigade's on-site strength to roughly 1,800.
Full operational readiness is planned before 2028 with more than 5,000 personnel. New permanent facilities at Rūdninkai are under construction. On track. On schedule. Berlin committed to a permanent combat presence on Russia's border and is delivering it.
The English-language defence commentary that treats the Zeitenwende as a failed promise largely ignores all of this. It compares German tank orders to Polish tank orders, finds Germany wanting, and moves on. That comparison captures roughly 5% of what Germany's defence transformation is attempting — and asks none of the questions that actually matter.
The Industrial Logic That Warsaw Cannot Replicate
Germany's approach to defence procurement is slower than Poland's. It is also doing something fundamentally different.
When KNDS produces the Leopard 2A8, Germany controls the supply chain, the intellectual property, and the upgrade path. When Poland buys K2s from Hyundai Rotem, it acquires capability at speed — but also a dependency on technology transfers that have already been slower than Warsaw expected. The pattern with South Korea's Altay cooperation with Turkey, begun in 2008 and still without full-rate serial production, is worth watching.
German defence industrial policy accepts longer timelines in exchange for strategic autonomy. The €377 billion procurement framework published in October 2025 — spanning roughly 320 programmes — represents the most comprehensive attempt by any European state to institutionalise defence procurement as a continuous national function rather than episodic crisis spending. Multi-year, output-linked, co-financed. The architecture is structurally serious.
BAAINBw's 11,800 staff exist because Germany decided that defence procurement should be subject to the same democratic oversight as any other public expenditure. Poland's 600-person Armament Agency moves faster partly because it answers to fewer institutional constraints. That is a trade-off, not a failure — and one that reflects a political choice about the relationship between military spending and democratic accountability that Germany has every right to make.
Germany also builds capabilities Poland does not attempt to replicate. Multi-layered integrated air defence. Space-based ISR. Nuclear sharing infrastructure. digitalisation at scale. The NATO command backbone that makes everyone else's hardware strategically coherent. Without these, Poland's tanks are a national achievement. With them, they are a NATO deterrent. The distinction is the entire point.
The One Problem Berlin Hasn't Solved
All of that said, there is a specific, bounded problem the Zeitenwende has not yet fixed — and it is too important to leave unnamed.
Germany has closed the money gap. It has not closed the throughput gap. The system can now afford to move faster. It does not yet move faster. Of the €377 billion procurement framework, only roughly €83 billion is expected to reach contractual commitment by end-2026. A ratio of roughly four-and-a-half to one between planning intent and binding orders.
The Beschaffungsbeschleunigungsgesetz — the Defence Procurement Acceleration Law — passed in 2022 and simplified certain contracting steps. Three years later, the Leopard 2A8 timeline has not meaningfully compressed. Ammunition shortages persist. Maintenance backlogs remain. The law changed. The institutional culture has been slower to follow.
This is not a systemic indictment. Lithuania proves Germany can execute at speed when political will overrides bureaucratic inertia — Panzerbrigade 45 moved from commitment to stood-up formation in under two years. The Eurofighter Tranche-5 approval, the F127 frigate radar selection, the Type 212CD submarine orders — these are real contracts reaching real production lines. As we assessed in our Eurofighter Tranche-5 analysis: the risk of the Zeitenwende is not a failure to spend, but a failure to convert spending into sovereign power at the pace the security environment demands.
Poland will put three modern tanks in the field for every one Germany produces on roughly the same timeline. Same endpoint. Three-to-one gap. That ratio measures something specific: the throughput gap that remains.
The bottleneck is, therefore, no longer political will or fiscal space but administrative throughput — the speed at which BAAINBw processes translate approved programmes into signed contracts and signed contracts into delivered capability.
That is a solvable problem. It is also the one Berlin must solve next, because the €377 billion framework's credibility depends on whether the throughput machinery can match the planning ambition. Poland's procurement speed is not simply a political choice Berlin could replicate by wanting it more. Warsaw's timelines were compressed by geography — a 232-kilometre border with Kaliningrad and a 418-kilometre border with Belarus impose a clarity that no policy paper can substitute. Germany inherited a peacetime procurement apparatus built for deliberation, not urgency, and layered it with the parliamentary oversight and procurement controls that postwar Germany built deliberately. Those are defensible values.
The task is not to dismantle that architecture but to run it at wartime tempo, making the process faster without abandoning what makes it legitimate — delegated contracting authority, parallel rather than sequential certification, and political cover for officials who prioritise speed over procedural perfection. Lithuania proves the system can do this. The question is whether it can do it as a default rather than an exception.
The Alliance Needs Both
The lazy version of the Poland-Germany comparison treats it as a competition. It is a dependency — rooted in genuinely different threat timelines. Poland arms for a scenario that could materialise within this decade. Germany is building the institutional architecture that makes European deterrence viable for the next three. NATO needs both to work simultaneously, and on different clocks.
Poland's armour mass anchors NATO's eastern flank. Germany's institutional architecture — air defence orchestration, command integration, industrial depth — is what converts that mass into a deterrent. The dependency runs both ways. Poland's 900 tanks without allied command infrastructure, integrated air defence coverage, and cross-border sustainment are a national force, not an alliance one. Germany's institutional contributions without sufficient force density on the eastern flank are an architecture with nothing to protect.
NATO's centre of gravity is shifting east. Poland, the Baltics, and the Nordics are spending at rates Western Europe will not match. That creates an alliance where the states with the most hardware have the least institutional weight, and the states with the most institutional weight have the least hardware. This is a structural problem with operational consequences. The eastern flank is acquiring platforms faster than the alliance is building the connective tissue — cross-border command integration, multinational procurement frameworks, industrial production at scale — that turns national armies into a combined force.
Germany sits on the other side of that equation — and that is precisely why its institutional role matters more, not less, as the alliance's military weight shifts eastward. Someone has to coordinate the air defence umbrella across twenty-four ESSI nations, host the command architecture, anchor the procurement frameworks that turn national inventories into interoperable capability, and provide the industrial base to sustain it. That role falls to Germany because it has the institutional mass AND the industrial capacity AND the geographic position to do it.
Managing that imbalance — ensuring that the states doing the most spending and the states providing the most structure are pulling in the same direction — is the alliance's defining challenge for this decade.
A case for Berlin reads like this: Germany is holding up its end of that equation more than most commentary acknowledges. The money is real. The capabilities are real. The Lithuania deployment is real. The ESSI leadership is real. The industrial framework is the most ambitious in Europe.
What remains is the last mile: converting institutional intent into institutional velocity. Berlin has solved the political problem, the fiscal problem, and the strategic problem. The administrative problem is the one that's left. It is the least dramatic of the four.
Großwald
