F-35s and Aircraft Carriers for Germany?
As I remarked previously while certain details of Olaf Scholz’s policy statement of last Sunday were widely reported the reporting was generally fragmentary and lacking in context. Simply put, few seemed to process that he was talking about a tripling of the defense budget this year (to $150–200 billion, making Germany the world’s third-biggest defense spender by a long way), and maintaining a much elevated defense budget in the years ahead at or above NATO’s 2 percent target.
When they missed even that it was unsurprising that they also missed the smaller, more ambiguous details, as when Scholz was discussing some of what the money was to be used for. In discussing the air force specifically Scholz made reference to Germany’s continuing to “build the next generation of combat aircraft . . . here in Europe together with European partners, and particularly France,” and in the meantime “continu[ing] to develop the Eurofighter [Typhoon] together,” making specific reference to how the “Eurofighter is set to be equipped with electronic warfare capabilities.” However, he also made reference to “a modern replacement for the outdated Tornado jets in good time” for the sake of NATO’s “nuclear sharing” arrangement, which sounded oddly ambiguous given the prior talk of procuring F-18s ( even if that decision had seemed to be dragging out endlessly), while he also mentioned, in a way that feels “random” at least when read in the transcript, that “[t]he F-35 fighter jet has the potential to be used as a carrier aircraft.”
Germany has not previously been a partner in the F-35 project, or a customer for the aircraft. Does this statement then imply that Germany might purchase F-35s? Additionally the reference to its “potential to be used as a carrier aircraft” is confusing. The plane does not have the “potential” to be a carrier aircraft. The “C” version of the F-35 was specifically designed for carrier operations, and the U.S. Navy has been using it in that role operationally for many years now. I responded by doing what all interested persons with any knowledge of the German language whatsoever, or even sufficient mental adroitness to properly use Google Translate properly (admittedly, probably not many of those in the English-language press, for all the idiot Hollywood propaganda about “elites” like journalists all being polyglot geniuses) should have done when coming upon that statement, namely lookg at the transcript of the statement in the original language. The relevant portion of the text reads as follows: “Das Kampfflugzeug F-35 kommt als Trägerflugzeug in Betracht” — does not mean that the “F-35 fighter jet has the potential to be used as a carrier aircraft,” but that the “fighter jet comes into consideration as a carrier aircraft” (emphasis added). Thus the statement concerns not what the plane might be able to do, but what, implicitly, the German government might want to do with it — as a carrier aircraft. (Moreover, lest one think that Scholz must have meant something other than ship-based combat aircraft, rest assured that “Träger” is indeed the German word for aircraft carrier, “flugzeug” means plane, and that “Trägerflugzeug” means carrier plane, just as “kampfflugzeug” means warplane.)
Of course, even assuming that I have not missed some subtlety of the language (anyone who knows better than I do may feel free to explain where I have gone wrong) and in fact succeeded in clearing up one confusing point I find myself faced with another, namely why Germany, a country without any aircraft carriers, and which has not announced the intent of procuring aircraft carriers, is considering the F-35 or anything else as specifically a carrier aircraft? One possible explanation would seem that the author of the statement had in mind the 2019 German proposal for a joint “European Union” carrier (which I must admit had seemed to me unlikely — I know of no such arrangement in the past and the European Union has never impressed me as likely to break this particular ground). Another is that a German government now spending so much more on defense than it was then, looking at its bigger budget, is thinking of acquiring its own carriers outright — and that this has been let slip as a subtle clue that went over the heads of, well, pretty much the whole press in the English-speaking press so far as I can tell. Regardless of what exactly this was about I suspect the matter will be made clear one way or the other soon enough.
Originally published at https://naderelhefnawy.blogspot.com.
