This is an op-ed by Sir Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and Moritz Schularick is president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
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Germany’s rearmament is not going nearly fast enough. While Germany and Europe urgently need more weapons, at the current pace it will take years for them to roll off the production line and to constitute an arsenal sufficient to deter Russia. In no other area will Germany invest as much money in the coming years. And in no area is the absence of economic rationality more pronounced. Without swift changes, Germany is on a path to waste billions in taxpayers’ money for the delayed delivery of partly outdated defence capabilities.
Nearly four years after Russia’s assault on Ukraine, large German defence producers still work in single shifts, five days a week, instead of three shifts, seven days a week. The current production rate for the Taurus long-range guided missile system is only a few a month. The production of the Iris-T air defence system — which could provide crucial support to defend Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter and which is also essential for closing gaps in Europe’s air defence — is positively artisanal.
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At its heart, this is a task of industrial scaling, something German industry is well placed to deliver. As economic historians, we know that without the coordinating hand of the government and economic expertise, this kind of crash rearmament programme will not happen fast enough. … the obvious path would be to create a national defence industrial board to assess resources, set quantitative production goals, negotiate capacity with industry and fast-track dual-use innovation. … “German rearmament” are two ominous words for historians, just as “state co-ordination” is a phrase we tend to eschew as believers in freemarket economics. However, in the face of an increasingly dangerous and heavily armed Russia, co-ordinated rearmament is imperative. Above all, it needs to happen at warp speed. …
Berlin has woken up to the Russian threat, but its thinking is stuck in the past … British readers of a certain age may find it hard to be enthusiastic about German rearmament. As historians, we understand their unease. However, this is not the 1910s or the 1930s. The 2020s are a time when the UK has been in a mutual defence alliance with Germany for close to 80 years; … The arguments for a more rapid and technologically advanced German rearmament are more than just narrowly military. They are also economic and strategic. We have four recommendations that add up to an “Operation Warp Speed” for German rearmament. …
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Yes, they dig up a lot of that and they’re number 4 with earth’s coal reserves. Though China has grown substantially in the last decades. Most products come from there and they really need a lot of energy. They massively invest in other forms of electricity as well to keep growing. They’re now trying to beat the US at artificial intelligence and that needs yet more water and electricity. Russia has the second largest coal reserves on earth. So more than China. And they don’t have much of an economy to use it themselves, so naturally they’ll have to export it. If it’s cheaper to dig it up there, or the Russians get desperate, it might make sense to acquire Russian coal. Russia is in possession of the largest natural gas reserves as well. And there’s a lot of other stuff in Siberia. And I’m not sure about the water situation there, and what that means for the region up to Lake Baikal.