When the invasion began in Ukraine, Germany activated a plan of the future, preparing for a scenario that he believed had been buried since the end of the Cold War: in the midst of wave of sabotageespionage and rising tensions with Russia, Berlin has accelerated a quiet transformation to ensure the country can sustain, move and protect allied forces in any crisis that erupts in Europe.
The return of total logistics. Germany conceived the so-called as OPLAN DEUa 1,200-page classified document born in a Berlin barracks just two years ago, as the operational core for a future war with Russia in which the country would once again be NATO’s great strategic corridor, one where the continuous movement of forces, supplies and reinforcements must be frictionless even under extreme pressure.
We are talking about a plan where it is anticipated that ports, rivers, highways, bridges and railways should move up to 800,000 soldiers allies to the East, a corridor with a logistical precision never seen since the Cold War, in a context where the Russian invasion of Ukraine itself has returned the idea of an “entire defense society” and where espionage, sabotage and airspace violations indicate that Moscow could act sooner of the expected 2029.
Aging infrastructures and vulnerabilities. It we have counted before with the European rearmament plans. The real state of infrastructure Germans acts as an uncomfortable mirror of decades overconfident in peace, exposing structural weaknesses that, if not corrected, would compromise the credibility of any collective European response. In 1995, no one thought that 2025 would be like it is.
The problem goes further of physical deterioration: many of the recent civil works were conceived 30 years ago without considering load, width or resilience requirements for heavy military traffic, which generates a hidden fragile points map whose management requires an analysis of engineering, security and territorial planning of enormous complexity. Added to this is the single path dependency in ports and critical stations, which turns any breakdown or accident into a possible strategic bottleneck. The urgency lies not only in repairing, but in redesigning infrastructure that were never intended as defensive elements and that now must be integrated into a continental military architecture.
The army experiment at home. The Journal told that the Bundeswehr is discovering that adapting a society to a defense horizon It requires much more than military exercises: it involves coordinating ministries, city councils, service companies, emergency bodies and transport operators under the same operational scheme. The recent essays have reflected how the speed of reaction, the management of urban space, the interoperability between civil and military and the ability to absorb unforeseen events constitute the decisive factors for an entire country to function as a reliable rearguard.
Practice shows that any seemingly minor detail (a sign, a poorly managed intersection, the absence of a protocol for drones or spontaneous demonstrations) can derail the convoy cadence. That is why each exercise has become a laboratory to detect errors that were not seen on paper and that require a continuous review of procedures, responsibilities and institutional habits.
Hybrid Warfare and sabotage. The growing attack frequencycable cuts, infrastructure fires and covert sabotage operations demonstrate that the real risk no longer comes solely from a conventional attack, but from the progressive wear and tear of logistics capacity through selective coups that seek to destabilize without formally crossing the threshold of war.
This modality requires distributed surveillance ranging from power stations to railway tunnels, including computer systems and private companies that were unaware of being potential targets. The difficulty is not only in neutralizing sabotage, but in anticipating it in an environment where state and parastatal actors act with tactics that exploit legal loopholes, demilitarized zones of responsibility and civil regulations designed for times of calm. In this gray terrain, each administrative or technological gap can become the entry point to affect the military mobility of all of NATO.
Between peace and war. Germany is immersed in a complex transition in which a political culture must be reconciled deeply pacifist with the need to build a highly capable defensive scaffolding. This delicate balance explains both the speed with which resources are mobilized and the caution with which the magnitude of the effort is communicated. Internally, the challenge is not small: preparing the population for a tense scenario without generating alarm nor social fractures, while the image is projected abroad of a country capable of supporting the alliance without becoming a provocative actor.
In this context, time emerges as the most determining factor: each technical or legislative advance compete against a marked international environment because of the unpredictabilitywhere the border between deterrence and vulnerability depends on the speed with which Germany manages to transform its civil structure into a competent instrument in the event of any eventuality.
Image | RawPixel
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings