Colonel Henry Neumann, Commander of the CBRN Defence Command, tells Gwyn Winfield about pulling all the elements of the German Armed Forces together CBRNeWORLD Bringing the band back together The German army has always had a very strong CBRN defence, but at heart it has always suffered from being strong in silos. Previously the commander of the school at Sonthofen was the Commanding General of the army units but he didn t actually own the units. These belonged to the commanding officers of the 1st and 10th Armoured Divisions, who could decide whether they wanted to release the troops to the CBRN commander. This lack of focus meant that there could, in theory, be a split in priorities of the various commanders in terms of training, operations and support. This has now been rectified, and in a ceremony on 23 April 2013 the new CBRN Defence Command of the Bundeswehr was stood up, with the eminence grise of the German MoD, Colonel Henry Neumann, as its new commander. This has not been a short process. It has been a long operation of gathering elements together, getting political and senior support and ensuring that it results in a CBRN force more suited to weather the extreme financial climate. Colonel Neumann explained, Today is the inauguration of the new Bundeswehr CBRN Defence Command. This will combine all CBRN defence capability of the Bundeswehr, not only the armed forces, but also their civilian forces. The Command will have three major tasks. The first is troop contribution, contributing specialists for CBRN Defence, reconnaissance, decontamination, CBRN advice and water purification, all the special tasks which will now be delivered only by the Bundeswehr CBRN Defence Command, so we need to be able to set up, prepare and train for this contribution. The next task is the training at our school, the new school for CBRN Defence and Protection Tasks. This includes also the civilian part of the Bundeswehr and covers also fire protection, Fall in! April saw the inception of the Bundeswehr s new CBRN Defence Command CBRNe World www.cbrneworld.com June 2013 CBRNe WORLD 25
CBRNeWORLD Bringing the band back together environmental protection, and Operational Health and Safety. The third part is the development of CBRN defence capabilities, which will be built inside the Bundeswehr CBRN Defence Commando., And here the Kommando will also be responsible for the development of capabilities throughout the entire Bundeswehr, not only the joint support and armed forces, but also civilian services. With these three tasks, he continued, we combine all capabilities for CBRN defence in one hand. We started this 13 years ago when we set up Joint Support, when we could gather of all the different capability issues within the Joint Support Command and at ministerial level, but the troops were with the services, with the branches, especially army and air force. When our minister decided three years ago to rebuild and restructure the Bundeswehr, to be able to reduce the manpower, we restarted the process from the beginning, to get together all the different CBRN defence issues. This time, the army agreed to hand over their capability, the Chemical Corps, to the Joint Support Service. Now we have pulled everything together; one exception is medical CBRN defence, which will remain in the Medical Corps. It is premature to combine it, but I see it as a possible task for the future. The hard part of this development was resources. We started with about 1,100 soldiers for the entire CBRN Defence Command, and we ended up with 1,943 soldiers, plus civilian forces, so it is a little less than 2,300 soldiers and civilians. The staff is located at Bruchsal, the school will remain in Sonthofen, one CBRN defence battalion (750) in Bruchsal, the 7th Battalion in Höxter (the former NRF Battalion) plus one special company in the north of Germany, which comprises two military fire-fighting platoons and one decon platoon. So the area of responsibility is from the very north to the very south, almost the entire republic. At the moment we are not in that structure. We still have two independent companies in Sonthofen, the light CBRN defence companies, but they will be integrated in the new battalions. Bruchsal has still a regiment, next year we will restructure it to a battalion, too. We will end up with two battalions, each comprising a support HQ and four CBRN companies, with different assets, two regular companies, a light company, and a company comprising CBRN Defence assets as well as military fire fighters.. We will integrate the Special Reaction Platoon into the Fourth Company, and in Höxter we will also integrate the mobile lab into the battalion staff, so that we have real scientific capability within the battalion structure, and not just only at the school. That is the next step, integrating the scientific capability, soldiers with a scientific background. They will be part of the battalion contributing to our missions, as an integral part; and we can train together, we can conduct exercises and if we have to deploy they know how to do it as an integral part of the battalion. It took us two years of hard work in the Joint Support with the help of many other organisations, for example the army office. It was a big struggle for resources and money, but finally it went up to the State Secretary and they all approved and agreed it. From 4 April with the Directive of The New Orientation of the Bundeswehr it was decided and we have started doing realisation. The first steps were done by midsummer last year, and the Command has been set up and now we are in position to command and control the forces, provide our contribution to the missions and take over the training and education of the school. It is only in the Department of Capability Development that we are a bit weak, as we don t have all the personnel yet, but that is a question of months, not years. By the end of September, we will have the final operational capability throughout all areas of the Command. One of the roles of the German air force has been their airfield protection, and they have their own recce and decon capability, in addition to the army s Fuchs and TEP90. What then becomes of this role? Does a Joint Force become purple by definition, that there could be a scenario where this role is done by (ex-) army troops, as the (ex-) air force troops are engaged in what would previously have been a land force s role? This would mean that all forces would have to be trained to the same level, have the same capability and that (wonder of wonders!) cap badge politics would become a thing of the past. Colonel Neumann suggested that it would be more complicated, To be clear, the air force is not contributing the former 9th Company of the Force Protection Regiment as this will be disbanded. We have had army, air force and navy military personnel in the Command staff from the beginning; as a joint support force we are purple, and will represent all services in the CBRN Defence Command. We are in negotiations with the navy, who is setting up two extra platoons for deployed missions, but these will be built and trained according to the directives of the Command; in the future we will probably have about one company wearing the navy uniform, but trained the same way. In terms of operations we do not think army, air force or navy we think weapon systems. It doesn t matter if it is an air base, a naval base, detection is detection, whether it is army, air force or navy. So even if we have air force uniform-wearing companies, it does not mean they are dedicated to their service; every company or platoon within the Bundeswehr CBRN Defence Command must be able to provide the service to everyone that needs it. A joint capability does raise some specialist issues. Naval forces, for example, are used to doing boarding operations, and CBRN just gets layered on top of that. That metric changes when that role is given to army individuals, who lack the muscle memory from doing it countless times. Will there be a common sense preference for some missions, that while any troops could do them, in essence it will always go to those that have the most familiarity with it? If all the units are going to be trained at Sonthofen does that mean that it will 26 CBRNe WORLD June 2013 www.cbrneworld.com
CBRNeWORLD Bringing the band back together The new joint capability will see the divisions between Army and Airforce CBRN become obsolete CBRNe World have to build some new facilities, or will it outsource elements to other facilities, whether military or civilian? If you look into this boarding issue, Colonel Neumann said, this comprises different specialities. All the things that you need to do the CBRN part of this operation will be trained and educated in Sonthofen, but in a boarding operation CBRN will never be in the lead, that would be special forces supported by specialists, of which CBRN may only be one. I need to train my soldiers to conduct this mission to provide CBRN expertise to do detection and analysis of the results, and probably some form of decon, but from my perspective boarding operations are not really something new, it is the same as entering and searching a house or supporting OPCW. From a CBRN perspective it is the same set of skills, just a different environment with different personnel and procedures, and this is what you need to get them used to, but detection is detection. It isn t just the Medical Corps which will stay outside of the CBRN Defence Command, the WIS Institute will maintain its independence, but at least the unification will allow more comprehensive and targeted research requests than previously. The Scientific and Research Institute in Munster has a dedicated mission to support the armaments and procurement branch of the MoD for investigation of materiel and equipment and research into new techniques. We already have a good cooperation, but this will be stronger in the future. From an organisational point of view it is not part of the Command, and therefore not under our command and control, but the ties will be stronger in the future, and the same will be true with the Medical part of CBRN defence. For example, we are going to develop new concepts for decon and we have to include personnel decon from the medical branch, to make it one common comprehensive concept. The CBRN Defence Command will be the lead for that. That is an advantage of the new structure, so while they will not belong to us we are the coordinating authority. A new element of the force that is 28 CBRNe WORLD June 2013 www.cbrneworld.com
CBRNeWORLD Bringing the band back together within the Command Structure is the military fire fighters (See CBRNe World Winter 2011) and this will be an exciting, but challenging development. Some big questions are still to be answered: such as whether there are enough fire fighters for the current missions; and whether this over stretch might have an impact on decon capability (as some are trained in decon as well); and that the disinfection and pest control role on operations might exacerbate this in the short term. This is likely to be (to paraphrase General Franco) a problem that time will solve, and there are bigger challenges facing the Command. Primary among these will be the future direction of the Command. Should it need focus on an all-hazard approach, or turn to a three-block model and drift further towards the Syrian/North Korean war-fighting? Colonel Neumann laughed. The simple answer is yes! We have to be prepared to support operations in an environment like Syria, so we have to have our formations in place, trained and equipped. On the other hand, even in those operations you need special capabilities, these civilian capabilities, to identify and analyse the entire spectrum of chemical agents and provide evidence. We are not in the Cold War where the main objective was to decon very rapidly and send the troops back to the front. We have to avoid any contamination and harm to our personnel, run forensic analysis and provide the chain of evidence, realizing that we live in an environment full of laws and regulations and as the military apply them too. To support the new NATO policy we must raise our capability to take on these civilian roles, and manage this with shrinking resources. As in every other armed force my defence minister will not provide 1,000+ soldiers just for new ideas! We have to see where we can limit our capabilities with decon, if we can prevent the proliferation and employment of WMD then we are able to reduce our decon capability: if we race on the left we can reduce on the right. We need to balance it at the moment. We need both, and it will be the task of the next couple of years to balance this and come out with a national concept that must be in line with NATO concept (which is almost finalised; there is only one nation opposing it). So hopefully in the middle of this year we can look at adjusting our national capability to suit Nato requirements. It is a neat plan, that if the nonproliferation is done right then the counter-proliferation can be eased up on. It does rather shift the focus away from the military, towards the politicians, and it is an endeavour that has been attempted for the past 40 years and the fruits of this effort can be seen in Syria, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. For there to be a military involvement in nonproliferation there needs to be a major investment in military intelligence, especially in the CBRN part. It is arguable that the West was not very good at this even during the Cold War, so the need to be able to rapidly identify facilities, and (if needed) eliminate their capability safely, requires a wide variety of skills and assets. Colonel Neumann agreed that it was difficult, and wouldn t have a quick solution: This is a difficult question. The prevention of proliferation with political, social and economic means, is not a military task. CBRN intelligence is not in first instance a military task, it is a task of different services, countries and the over-arching organisation, like NATO and the UN. To be able to contribute to this process we have to internally enhance our ability in CBRN-related intelligence. I will have a CBRN liaison officer to our Intel Office, from 1 July one of my staff officers will work inside the military intelligence agency, and link from there to the Centre of Excellence in Vyskov. We realised that we have to put more effort into this. It is not enough to sit and wait until something happens and then do the mitigation. You need to be in front of the wave. But it has to be a comprehensive approach, not just military. One of my tasks as Commander will be to contact the civilian organizations in Germany, below the level of ministries, and raise their understanding of the problem and invite them to contribute. We have another colonel doing the same at the ministerial level, with the Ministry of Interior, Foreign Office etc. We cannot exaggerate the military role in this, it is only a small part. We have been the first to see it, but we need to convince the other players to get into the game. That is one of the priorities, to set up an organization to contribute to the process, but we are not in charge. I am in little doubt that the inauguration ceremony was a longheld vision of Colonel Neumann, who has been working towards this end for at least six years, and there is a finality of some of his predictions towards also bringing Medical CBRN within the wire. It is a big change for German CBRN; combining all the elements will destroy various satrapies and allow a clear vision to be built upon. As with any system that consolidates power there is always the concern that it allows individuals to shape capability with fewer checks and balances on excess. This might, however, be a problem for the far future. With CBRN under threat the last thing it needs is the death of a thousand cuts. A combined, Joint capability will be able to hold its own against service chiefs, bureaucrats and politicians far better than when it was bigger isolated strongpoints. Currently it is in a consolidation phase, accusations of empire building will have to wait for when there is enough money to build an empire! As always it is interesting to see how these things develop, and often it is some nebulous future date, but the advantage of the Nato Response Force (NRF), and the Combined Joint CBRN Defence Task Force is that there is always a chance to see how the force has improved, not only in terms of studying the force composition but also by observing and validating it in exercises such as Golden Mask (See CBRNe World Winter 2007). So then proof of the improvement should be obvious for all to see. 30 CBRNe WORLD June 2013 www.cbrneworld.com