Key Points and Summary – Germany has quietly produced a 1,200-page Operational Plan for Germany that assumes a large-scale war with Russia and treats time as the key variable.
-Drawn up at Julius Leber Barracks, the plan details how up to 800,000 German, U.S. and other NATO troops would flow east via ports, rivers, rail and roads—and how they’d be supplied and protected en route.
-Rather than just counting tanks and troops, Berlin is betting on logistics and an “all-of-society” approach, from infrastructure to cyber. With Russian sabotage and probing already mounting, officials see a genuine race against time to be ready.
Germany’s Secret War Plan for Russia Is a Race Against Time
Two and a half years ago, a dozen senior German military officers came together at a triangle-shaped military compound in Berlin.
The purpose of their meeting was simple: to develop a secret plan for a future war against Russia.
According to a Dec. 6 story in the Wall Street Journal, those officers and their subordinates are now working overtime to implement the effort.
It is described by other NATO-nation defense officials who spoke to National Security Journal as a “race against time.”
“We are all in the same race,” said one of these individuals. “The collective [NATO] military capacity needs to be reinforced, expanded, reduced in its vulnerability and made such that there are levels of redundancy that account for multiple contingencies. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has a clear goal in mind. Keep mobilizing more soldiers, keep building more weapons and thus overpower NATO with sheer mass.”
However, added this official and others, Putin’s continued reliance on mass may turn out to be his weakness, if not his undoing.
The February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended decades of stability in Europe and generally turned assumptions about the post-war military balance on the continent upside down.
Since then, the region has embarked on the most extensive military buildup since the end of World War II.
Professional Soldiers Study Logistics
What differentiates the plan devised in Germany from previous rearmament initiatives is its focus away from the “bean-counting” approach to assessing an adversary’s capabilities.
Having greater numbers of service members, weapons, aircraft, etc—the “mass” that Putin believes Russia can rely on almost exclusively—is a nice position to be in.
Still, those numbers alone will not decide the outcome of a future war.
One of the keys to victory in such a conflict is the degree to which it is supportable, and how long the necessary operational tempo can be sustained.
What it comes down to is one of the main lessons of warfare: “Amateurs discuss tactics but professional soldiers study logistics.”
A military’s logistical prowess enables victory in a large-scale conflict. Therefore, at the center of the Bundeswehr’s Operational Plan for Germany is ensuring that allied forces will not lack logistical support.
The plan is a 1,200-page classified document that was compiled at the Julius Leber Barracks, the largest Bundeswehr facility of its kind in Berlin. It is located in the outer district of Wedding, directly southeast of the old Berlin-Tegel Airport.
The German plan devotes considerable pages to detailing how up to 800,000 German, U.S., and other NATO-nation troops would be transported eastward toward the battle area.
The plan charts how the various European ports, rivers, rail lines, and roadways would be used, what types of units would travel on them, and how those same units would be supplied and protected while in transit.
Geography and Society Are Destiny
“Look at the map,” said Tim Stuchtey, Executive Director of the Brandenburg Institute for Society and Security. “The exploits of Hannibal against the Roman Legions aside, the Alps form a geographic natural barrier, which makes it necessary for NATO military units to cross Germany in the event of a conflict with Russia, he added, “regardless of where it might start.”
The plan shows a major shift in how Germany and other European nations view their own defense.
For decades now, said a retired U.S. Army flag rank officer, “the attitude among the U.S. and Europeans is that the defense of our countries was the responsibility of the professional military. It is their job, we would say, and we saw them as taking care of the entire prospect of national defense without involving any of the rest of us.”
What the German plan calls for is an “all-of-society approach” to waging war.
This means not only a remake of the old Cold War-era mentality that says, “we are all in this together,” but also a recognition that there is not always a clear delineation between the civilian and military realms.
This approach further calls for recognition of new threats, said the retired Army senior officer. “The new hazards we worry about—commercial drones used for military purposes, cyberattacks, the means to bring down critical infrastructure—are now also part of the equation.”
German officials have said they expect Russia to be ready and willing to attack NATO in 2029.
But a list of spying incidents, sabotage attacks, drones disrupting air traffic, and airspace intrusion in Europe that are assessed by U.S. and European intelligence services to have been sponsored or carried out by Moscow could indicate that an attack from Russia will come sooner.
Therefore, the question is how to be ready sooner—how to win that race against time.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
