Germany wants to give the impression it is meeting its international defence spending commitments but appears uninterested in actually putting the work in.
Instead, Olaf Scholz’s administration is considering playing “smoke and mirrors” by counting motorway repairs as a defence expenditure.
That is according to a report in the German daily Süddeutsche, which quoted CDU MP Ingo Gädechens as saying:
Now even motorways are supposed to be defence-relevant—despite the fact that the government has no idea of the actual military significance of our motorways.
Berlin has argued that bridge repairs should count as defence spending because public roads are used to transport tanks. More importantly, this would help the country hit NATO’s 2% of GDP target, set after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
This, said Bundestag member Thomas Erndl (CSU), “is not a serious defence policy.”
Germany said it hit the 2% NATO spending target for the first time since the early 1990s this February—this just days after former U.S. president Donald Trump threatened to refuse protection to NATO allies not spending enough on defence.
But much of what Berlin declares to NATO as defence spending is “classified,” meaning there could be other avenues of questionable spending which the press has yet to discover.
