The Third World War: August 1985

The three German corps embodied sixteen armoured brigades (each with three battalions of tanks, one of armoured infantry and one of armoured artillery), fifteen armoured infantry brigades (each containing two tank and two armoured infantry battalions, one of Jager infantry and one of armoured artillery), with units mostly organized broadly on US models, together with two mountain and three airborne brigades. They were on the whole in very good shape, well officered and well equipped. In an army in which roughly half of its regular strength of 350,000 were conscripts, the general level of troop training was not as high, or as even, as that of an all-regular long-service force like the British. Units had on the whole been kept up to strength rather better than the British, however, and there had been fewer reorganizations in the interests of economy (always presented politically in Britain as improvements in military effectiveness) and a more realistic approach by the Federal government to the provision and maintenance of equipment. The Bundeswehr had thus suffered less from its politicians than its brothers-in-arms in Britain, where cynicism and insularity had long traded on a depth of good will and loyalty in the country’s armed forces that few governments of any party had done much to deserve.

Of two major improvements brought about in the army of the FRG in the five years before the outbreak of war, one was structural, the other operational.

The first concerned reserves. Three Territorial Commands, each of five Military Districts, had been created. In these commands six Home Defence Brigades formed the fighting core of a reserve force with a peacetime strength of some 63,000 (including 30,000 conscripts still working out their reserve service) and an ultimate full mobilization strength for the Territorial Army of half a million. The Federal government was not at first inclined to place these resources under NATO command. They represented, it was argued, the last armed forces available to the Federal Republic as a sovereign power and should remain at its disposal alone. Arguments for undivided command in time of war proved more persuasive. Events were to show the wisdom of assigning these reserve forces, at least on mobilization, to SACEUR.

The second improvement reflected a change in outlook on the best method of defending Federal territory. ‘Forward defence’ on the frontier could hardly mean in military terms anything other than a defence forward of the frontier, a point Warsaw Pact planners were not slow to take. The clearest alternative was defence in depth, trading ground at the best possible rate for the time needed to set up a counter-offensive. This, though it made good military sense, was hardly popular with politicians publicly dedicated to the total defence of the integrity of Federal territory.

The rapid development of anti-tank techniques, the increasing urbanization of much of West Germany and the growing size of the FRG’s military reserves suggested another approach. A network of squads of reservists, locally drawn and armed with ATGW, was incorporated into the operation of the covering forces along the frontier.

A concept had been gradually gaining favour in the Federal Republic since the end of the seventies under which a defence against attack from the East would be organized in three tiers. These would comprise a frontier defence almost entirely composed of Jagd Kommandos (tank-hunting and skirmishing units), with powerful counter-penetration forces in depth in what was described as Raumdeckende Verteidigung (spatial defence) and an area of Heimat Schutz (so-called Homeland Defence), depending mostly on territorial forces, in further depth behind that.

The covering forces deployed by AFCENT would still be expected to fight a delaying battle forward. In the late seventies the proportion of troop strengths in forward corps assigned to fight the covering-force battle had been some 30 to 50 per cent of the whole formation, all along the front of the Central Region. New tactics in NORTHAG, appropriate to the terrain, had enabled forward corps to reduce this to some extent. The full covering-force concept, however, was still to prevail in CENTAG where lack of depth made it important to give away as little ground as possible.