The Quest for Relevant Air Power

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and actual operational requirements, did the newly elected defence
minister, Peter Struck, deem it indispensable to undertake
significant adjustments of the military reform. This process started
in late 2002 and resulted in the 2003 Defence Policy Guidelines. 11
The guidelines can be understood as a fundamental change in
paradigms towards a more proactive defence policy, where out-ofarea
operations are the core business of Germany’s armed forces.
As such, Struck’s adjustments were in fact a reform in their own
right. With the conservatives winning the elections of 2005, Franz
Josef Jung, the new defence minister, released the White Paper
2006: German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr. It
not only reiterated the importance of deployed operations but also
emphasised the territorial defence of Germany against external
threats as the German armed forces’ raison d’être and core function,
thus partially reversing Struck’s reform. 12 In October 2009,
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became the new German defence
minister. Despite being a member of a conservative party, as was
his predecessor, Guttenberg intends to embark upon the most farreaching
reform of the post–Cold War era. While the exact corollaries
of this reform cannot yet be grasped (up to this writing),
they will most likely result in smaller armed forces better suited
for deployed operations. As such, potential force reductions are
alluded to in this chapter.
Threat and Risk Perception. The 1992 Defence Policy Guidelines,
published on 26 November, identified recent changes on the
European continent as irreversible. The reunification of Germany,
the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the democratisation in
Eastern Europe laid a solid basis for a process of which Germany
was the main beneficiary. The country was no longer in the direct
vicinity of an opposing military alliance but surrounded by allies
and partners. The guidelines argued that, for the foreseeable future,
Russia had neither the rationale nor the economic and military
potential to wage a large-scale offensive against NATO. Provided
there was the capacity for a flexible reconstitution of Western
armed forces, a full-scale invasion was not conceivable without at
least one year of warning time. While Central Europe could benefit
from immense improvements, internal conflicts and collapsing
states as well as the proliferation of WMDs at the European periphery
were perceived to be serious challenges. The increased inter-