Military Technology 04/2021

MT 4/2021 · 1 This magazine is headquartered and administered near Bonn, Germany; edited in Great Britain; and has a world- wide readership. It does not, therefore, seem inappropriate to pen a few editorial observations about Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, since by the time the next issue of MilTech appears in print, she will no longer be the Chancellor – though she will, naturally, still be German! And that is the first observation. Angela Merkel, who has occupied her nation’s top post for the last sixteen years (only Vladimir Putin has been in power longer among the developd nations), is German, proud of it, and displays all the virtues of her race: hard working, logical and pragmatic. Yet she is also collegial, empathic and has a sense of humour acknowledged by many of her peers to be ‘wicked.’ The extent to which she breaks the mould of ‘German,’ however, is not something that was necessarily recog- nized early in her career. Helmut Kohl, who gave her the job that amounted to the first step in her rise to power – after the fall of the Berlin Wall – must have been awfully surprised to find it was her widely-read comment in the Frankfurter Allgemeine that started his slippery slope towards oblivion following a late 1990s party funding scandal. [indent] That revealed her political acumen, her burning desire to ‘do the right thing’ and the moral courage to voice and defend such an opinion in a world thoroughly dominated by seriously old-fashioned ‘good old’ boys.’ [indent] One of the many recent essayists to provide little- known details of Germany’s first female Chancellor recounts the tale of being at the Munich Security Conference early in the first administration and, seeing a senior officer she knew well, who worked closely with the Chancellor, asked him what it was like. “It’s like working next to a nuclear power plant: it goes on and on”, was the – smiling – response. The Merkel Legacy? Editorial was putting out up to three polls per week in an effort to find whether proposed actions would be palatable to the public. Cautious? Methodical, rather. There is a great deal to be said for process-centric decision-making, especially when those decisions affect 83 million people. Yet she doesn’t always take the safe, cautious route. In what perhaps may be seen by later historians as her defining moment – and one applauded by many Germans recently consulted – she took the opposite route to the one polling suggested and opened the nation’s borders to refugees. The mark of a leader keen to ‘do the right thing,’ perhaps? No politician is universally adored – though some manage to reach the other end of the spectrum. That’s just the cost of being in politics. We believe Frau Merkel’s legacy is to leave Germany better prepared for the future, and in a better situation vis-à-vis the majority of her neigh- bours and allies than was the case 16 years ago. Some will say her successor has big shoes to fill. Others will suggest that most peo- ple with big shoes are clowns. We say it doesn’t really matter how big the shoes are. It’s who is wearing them – and what they do with them – that makes the difference. Walk a mile in Angela’s shoes, anybody? Tim Mahon Editor-in-Chief But the thing that has endeared her to many – and, one presumes, frustrated so many others – is that she is a perfectly ordinary German lady, who happens to be Chancellor. After sixteen years, she still lives in a modest Berlin apartment, rather than an official residence. To the almost inevitable frustration of her security details, she is not infrequently seen shopping in local supermarkets. It is difficult to imagine Boris Johnson doing the same – unless television cameras happen to be present, of course. “Disturbingly normal,” was the description once applied – to Merkel, that is – not to Johnson! Her self-effacing nature is the second observation. She doesn’t want to hide from the limelight – she just doesn’t seek it out. Fundamentally, she is a scientist – a quantum chemist from former East Berlin, in fact – and one cannot help but reach the inescapable conclusion she just wants to be left in peace to get a difficult job done. And the job has undoubtedly been difficult. The financial crisis and Eurozone instability of 2008; the so-called Global War on Terror and the debate it has inspired in Germany; Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its increasing assertiveness (2014); the refugee crisis (2015); Brexit and the rise of the German right (2016-2021); COVID (2020-????) – just some of the thorny problems with which she has had to deal. In doing so, she has attracted global attention and admiration in equal measure (alongside, it has to be said, plenty of criticism), resulting in her often being referred to as the ‘leader of the free world,’ a sobriquet she is said to loathe with a passion. She is not a great orator. She has very few preten- sions. She is often accused of being opaque and far too cautious. Early in her Chancellorship, her office