Weaponizing Time – Part III: The Steel-Hard Casing of Imperial Deferral
From Operationsplan Deutschland to the Biedermann complex: How Western elites are cementing a logistical infrastructure of despair that no future government can undo.
Prelude: Handing over the Matches
On 25 November 2025, just days after the so-called 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan was unearthed on 20 November and while a revised 19-point version was reportedly being drafted, the German Foreign Office tweeted:
“Putin eyes the #EU and #NATO. Our intelligence services are issuing urgent warnings: at the very least, Russia is creating the option for itself to wage war against NATO by 2029. We have to deter further Russian aggression, together with our partners and allies.”
It is a textbook attempt to manufacture fear, complete with the now familiar invocation of the ominous year 2029, one year before the US Army (along with NATO) expects its multi-domain operations (MDO) architecture to be in place. Within this context, NATO states are already laying out plans and ramping up their recruitment campaigns. We can expect a torrent of fear-mongering, accompanied by “mysterious” drone incidents and other grey-zone warfare theatrics. In other words, the abstract doctrines, strategies, and theories we dissected in Part I and Part II are already finding their material manifestation in the real world.
If we take a step back from the ceasefire point-plans themselves, we should turn our attention to the roles assigned to Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—not only as potential proxies, but at minimum as instigators, or perhaps as latter-day Biedermänner, to borrow the famous playwright Max Frisch’s term. In Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, the character of Gottlieb Biedermann is not the arsonist but the respectable homeowner who, out of denial and a craving for normality and conformity, while being desperate to appear reasonable, actually helps the arsonists haul the petrol drums into his attic and eventually hands them the matches.
Likewise, this is the precise condition of the European power elite today. They are not just potential proxies serving American hegemonic interests; they are active instigators, drafting plans that escalate conflict under the guise of security. And ultimately, they are Biedermänner: wilfully converting their own home, Western European soil, into the primary logistics hub and battlefield for the next great war, handing over the matches while hoping the fire will only burn their neighbors. (Or in a more sinister manner: they simply do not care for their citizens.)
On the surface, a 19- or 28-point plan sounds like de-escalation and a pathway to peace, and any attempt at such should be applauded. But for anyone familiar with contemporary US-led strategic vocabulary, the pattern is hard to miss. While the plan speaks of Ukrainian interests and reconstruction, its European sponsors, for example, are not on board with diverting frozen Russian assets into US-led reconstruction projects. And instead aim to finance this “peace” by diverting frozen Russian assets into the European armaments industry. The condition for this flow is the continuation, rather than the termination, of a state of war, as long as arms exports keep moving. (Not to mention, who has the right to use those frozen Russian assets anyway?)
The practical application of these doctrines of strategic ambiguity, MDO, and so on, makes clear that “reconstruction” and “ceasefire” do not necessarily mean peace. They name a managed, permanent state of conflict designed to weaken any actor that dares to challenge the American-led status quo. In this configuration, the refurbishment of Europe’s defense industry is to be carried out effectively at the enemy’s expense.
Put simply, the seemingly technocratic surface of diplomacy, from the ‘peace plans’ down to the government’s carefully curated social media channels, is merely the arena of implementation. It is the mechanism by which the abstract doctrines we analyzed in Part II, rooted in the worldview of Part I, are spelled into reality.
However, doctrines need more than just tweets to function; they need concrete, steel, and rail. If Europe is to become the theater for this new war, Germany is the stage.
This brings us almost to the core of Part III: the physical manifestation of these strategies. We are witnessing the stealth militarization of the German landscape itself, a process formalized under the classified ‘Operationsplan Deutschland’ (OPLAN DEU). This plan transforms the country from a sovereign state into a logistical turntable for NATO, a process carried out through administrative fiat by functional elites who have positioned themselves as proxies, instigators, and Biedermänner in a war they once claimed was safely out there.
Yet to understand how this physical transformation is being enforced on the ground, we must first look at the supranational bureaucratic steel-hard casing being constructed to ensure this militarization can never be dismantled.
I. Introduction: The New Weberian Steel-Hard Casing
Recently, Manfred Weber, President of the European People’s Party (EPP) and its parliamentary leader, a man who has represented Germany in the EU since 2004, foreshadowed the German Foreign Office’s tweet. On October 24th, 2025, both on social media and within the European Parliament, he stated:
“Europeans expect Europe to be able to defend itself. We need European joint defence projects and to go back to Schuman, Adenauer, and De Gasperi’s vision of building a European army. European defence cooperation must reach a level that no future government can undo.”
He expanded on this financial commitment explicitly:
“When it comes to defence, we will spend, in the next ten years, 6.4 trillion € as Europeans. That is the same amount of money as the Americans will invest… That means we have to explore the European added value. The drone initiative, the missile defence, a sky shield, all the initiatives now presented by the Commission.”
Coming from a politician named Weber, there’s ironically something the sociologist Max Weber might point out: here is the outline of a new steel-hard casing (stahlhartes Gehäuse) of defense integration. It is an institutional structure designed so that no future government can escape. It is not an iron cage that could rust or decay, but a casing of modern, impenetrable steel. In Max Weber’s words, it is the “irrationality of rationality”: the use of hyper-rational tools, budgets, deficits, and procurement lists, to serve a vision that is fundamentally messianic. This institutional machine, consequently, disconnects means from ethical ends. And yet, for many of the officials building it, this does not feel like a grey, disenchanted shell at all, but a meaningful civilizational project. It is a “garden” to be defended against a surrounding “jungle” in the famous words of Josep Borell.
Indeed, the ideological particles of this steel-hard casing are reflected in the almost offhand remarks of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz after his November 2025 trips to Brazil and Angola. Returning from COP30 in Belém, he told a Berlin trade conference that he had asked the journalists travelling with him who would actually want to stay there, “no one raised their hand”, he added, all were relieved to “return from this place to Germany”. A few days later, after the EU–Africa summit in Luanda, he stood in a Hamburg bakery and joked that only then did he remember “what you have with German bread”, having searched in vain at the Luanda hotel buffet for a “decent piece of bread”. Such provincial-sounding statements reflect and signal a familiar civilizational ranking, where Germany is the well-ordered garden, while Brazil and Angola are the barely tolerable outside. It is within this gradient of assumed superiority that an irreversible European defense architecture and the conversion of European territory into a forward operating base can appear self-evident and even morally necessary.
To get back to Manfred Weber: This figure, €6.4 trillion, alludes to the collective projections of European military expenditures over the next decade, much of which is codified in the ReArm Europe Plan. Unveiled by Commission President von der Leyen in March 2025, this massive initiative projects up to €800 billion in leveraged defense investment over just four years through new financing mechanisms:
SAFE (Security Action for Europe): A €150 billion loan facility backed by the EU budget for joint defense procurement.
National Escape Clause Activation: A mechanism allowing member states to exceed normal deficit limits by up to 1.5% of GDP annually for defense spending, potentially unlocking €650 billion.
Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030: Outlining specific capability targets, including four “European Readiness Flagships”: a European Air Shield, Drone Defence Initiative, Eastern Flank Watch, and Space Shield.
This European build-up is occurring in lockstep with American demands. In early October 2025, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, speaking alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, made it clear that the U.S. expects allies to purchase and donate “even more” American weapons for Ukraine. These purchases fall under the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative. Effectively, this scheme means that European members will regularly foot the bill for Ukraine’s equipment. At the same time, the U.S. fast-tracks the supply, deepening the integration of European capital with the American military-industrial base. Here, it is a telling detail that the implementation of PURL proceeded seamlessly, even amidst the paralysis of a US government shutdown.
But what’s most eye-opening about all this is Weber’s statement that European defense cooperation must reach a level “that no future government can undo.” This is undemocratic to the core, and it also points to a larger implementation of the doctrine of MDO across the US hegemon and its allies, an implementation that, simply by the nature of the infrastructure required for future warfare, will indeed be extremely difficult to undo.
This concept of “undoing” brings us back to the ground level. Policy can be repealed, but concrete is harder to remove. This infrastructural lock-in, the laying of the physical foundations of this new steel-hard casing on German soil via the Operationsplan Deutschland, is the topic of the next section.
II. Forging the Casing: The Infrastructure of Control
What is the material composition of this casing’s steel? Germany’s transformation since the 2022-declared Zeitenwende reaches far beyond mere increases in defense spending or military readiness. The Federal Republic has become the essential physical and organizational infrastructure enabling the U.S.–led NATO system’s transition toward what the US Army now calls “transregional and global” warfare, anchored specifically within the European continental context.
In effect, Germany functions as the central European node within a planetary command, control, and projection network. Its territory, logistics, and digital systems are being rewired to sustain continuous mobilization, hosting forward-deployed formations, pre-positioned stocks, and the data flows that coordinate them. This reconfiguration materializes the abstractions of doctrines like Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) and the Unified Network: it is the translation of global integration into continental infrastructure.
What emerges through this infrastructure is a new form of dependency, both territorial and systemic, in which interoperability itself becomes a mechanism of control. Germany administers the machinery of alliance defense, yet the strategic design, the decisions on how the petrol drums are stacked and where the matches are struck, lies elsewhere.
III. OPLAN DEU: The Total Subordination of Public Space
The Bundeswehr describes the classified, 1,200-page Operationsplan Deutschland (OPLAN DEU), quietly implemented at the end of 2023, as the first comprehensive concept for homeland and alliance defense. But to truly understand the nature of this plan, we must look back to the doctrinal shift we analyzed in Part II: the evolution from Multi-Domain Battle (MDB) to Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) within the US military, a doctrine that necessarily has to be applied to and adopted by its allies (or vassals, depending on your point of view) to be functional on the global scale.
This change in the doctrine’s name was never only semantic. “Battle“ implies a conflict constrained by geography and time; it has a start, a finish, and a front line. “Operations,” by contrast, are continuous, total, and limitless. The US military justifies this shift by claiming that rivals like China and Russia employ “grey zone“ or “hybrid warfare,” a “whole-of-society“ approach that blurs the lines between peace and conflict and between civilian public and military space. Interestingly, the US definition of “grey zone“ threats includes non-kinetic actions, economic competition, diplomatic maneuvering, or infrastructure investment that merely challenge the American-led status quo. Logically, because the threat is defined as anything that disrupts US hegemony, there is no longer a distinct peacetime, nor a specific war zone. In other words, the logistics and the provided infrastructure for the MDO implementation must be permanent and total.
What does this mean in the specific case of Germany? Well, OPLAN DEU is the materialization of this doctrine on European soil: a permanent mobilization and militarization where no temporal, geographical, or social sector is exempt. In practical terms, this is a blueprint for host-nation subordination. The NATO concept of “Host Nation Support” strips the host nation of any sovereign dignity; it refers strictly to a territory that provides the logistical skeleton, infrastructure, equipment, administrative support, accommodation, and biological resources to support a wider war effort planned and decided elsewhere. And, unfortunately, the OPLAN DEU directly incorporates Host Nation Support as one of its core functions:
“Overall responsibility lies with the Bundeswehr Operations Command (OpFüKdoBw). This central command conducts national and alliance operations within Germany, which includes: Host Nation Support (support for allied forces on domestic soil).”
If we view the OPLAN through the lens of Stephen Graham’s New Military Urbanism, as well as through MDO, we see that it systematically and gradually transforms Germany into a battlespace:
“and nothing lies outside the multidimensional, multiscale concept of battlespace, temporally or geographically.”
Indeed, on the institutional level, the plan formalizes a “Whole-of-Government Approach“ (Gesamtstaatlicher Ansatz), integrating federal authorities, municipalities, and private companies into a unified command structure. Not to mention the integration of the “Whole-of-Society Approach”.
Thus, the integration of institutions and civilian life through OPLAN DEU within NATO’s logic is not just an abstract process. In effect, we are witnessing the conversion of civilian territory, and with it its public space, into a permanent military transit zone, designed to accommodate as many as 800,000 NATO troops and 200,000 vehicles in a major crisis, primarily funneling them toward the alliance’s eastern flank. Under this regime, every layer of civil administration, from fire brigades and medical services to regional governments, is subordinated to a military logistics regime whose demands will override ordinary governance.
Here, Germany’s Autobahnen have become the hardened arteries of military mobility. Key highways like the A2, stretching from the Ruhr industrial heartland to the Polish border, are now pre-designated corridors for troop movement. State governments from Schleswig-Holstein to Bavaria have signed agreements granting “far-reaching blanket permission” for Bundeswehr and NATO convoys, effectively eliminating the civilian oversight of individual transport permits. What was once civilian infrastructure, roads, rail lines, fuel depots, and rest stops, is slowly but surely being absorbed into the Militärstraßengrundnetz (the national military road network). Through administrative decree, these dual-use routes are turned into priority lanes for defense, a shift executed through the natural reflex of an administrative elite aligning itself with NATO readiness plans rather than the needs of its own populace.
What’s worse, but absolutely congruent with the OPLAN DEU’s logic, this subordination extends to the biological maintenance of the population. The German medical system is being integrated into this readiness footing, with contingency plans that explicitly deprioritize civilian care. In this new spatial hierarchy, the soldier is a strategic asset.
Legally and politically, this marks a shift into what Giorgio Agamben defined as the State of Exception. The modern state of exception, Agamben noted, historically begins when civilian authority passes to the military commander. OPLAN DEU normalizes this transfer as a permanent condition. Indeed, Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently captured the essence of this Agambian nightmare when he stated that we are “neither at war nor at peace.” Not to mention the recent invocation of the “state of tension” in German media and by some politicians. The state of tension is designed as a preliminary stage to the defense stage. Still, the debate about invoking it in response to “hybrid” threats (such as drone sightings) shows how the exception threatens to become permanent. The state of tension’s function is precisely to unlock emergency legislation, or, as Agamben calls it, to make the exception operational within the normal legal order. This ambiguity is the mechanism of control. And just like that, state governments sign blanket permissions for military convoys, and administrative decrees turn roads into priority defense lanes, an indisputable militarization of public space executed under the guise of bureaucratic readiness.
Yet, while these spatial transformations flow from government decrees, the sphere of private enterprise is an integral component of OPLAN DEU (alongside its transatlantic sibling structures, MDO and the AUNP).
The Privatization of the Battlespace
To sustain the continuous, limitless nature of Western warfare driven by MDO, the Autobahn’s physical infrastructure is now being punctuated by Convoy Support Centers (CSCs). These are established at regular intervals and serve as refueling, repair, and staging nodes. Crucially, many are operated not by the state, but by private contractors, foremost among them Rheinmetall, the industrial architect of this new steel casing and the flagship of Germany’s remilitarization.
In February 2025, Rheinmetall secured a framework contract worth up to €260 million to manage and expand these CSCs through 2029. This date aligns precisely with the de facto war-readiness timeline issued by the German Foreign Office and the US Army’s MDO capability targets. Rheinmetall thus becomes “the first industrial partner” responsible for operating support hubs along convoy routes, extending services not only to German troops but to the entire spectrum of allied forces, including NATO, the UN, the EU, and Partnership for Peace countries (which are NATO non-member states primarily in the Euro-Atlantic area).
The prototype facility at Oberlausitz, built in fourteen days and dismantled in seven for Exercise National Guardian 2025, functioned as a “pop-up” node in a continental supply web. This reveals a profound shift in governance: rather than rebuilding Bundeswehr logistics through public investment and sovereign control, Berlin has outsourced military mobility itself to industry. (Not to say that if the Bundeswehr carried these processes out, they would be acting sovereign.) Rheinmetall’s profit model now depends on perpetual military traffic, operating on the assumption that Germany’s highways will function indefinitely as the arteries of a permanent mobilization for the foreseeable future.
Corporate and industrial integration follow naturally, extending from the asphalt of the Autobahn into the code of the mainframe. Rheinmetall’s CSCs and Airbus Defence and Space’s cyber divisions anchor the private side of this new logistics state. This integration reaches its apex in the “Digital Brigade” concept, specifically the Digitization of Land-Based Operations (D-LBO). Here, military functions are broken down into “apps” within a networked battlespace.
Why are these apps so critical? In the doctrine of MDO and mosaic warfare, speed is the only currency. Just as a consumer app matches a rider with the nearest driver, these military apps instantaneously match a “Sensor” (a drone spotting a target) with the best available “Shooter” (a tank, artillery piece, or jet), regardless of nationality. Similarly, apps like the Battle Management System (BMS) provide a “Blue Force Tracker,” turning the fog of war into a transparent, gamified interface. Most importantly, these apps enforce NATO standards of interoperability. To participate in the Digital Brigade, the Bundeswehr must run software fully compatible with US systems. This creates a digital lock-in: the German military cannot fight, move, or communicate unless it is running the operating system defined by the US hegemon.
However, this process permeates deeper than just the industrial giants. As noted by Dr. Ebner, an international lawyer advising on geopolitics, in a November 2025 interview with Neutrality Studies, we are witnessing a “dual-use surge” across the German economy. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the traditional backbone of the German economy, are increasingly repurposing civilian products for military applications to meet US specifications. Further, Dr. Ebner reveals that active weapons testing is already ongoing within German borders, cementing the reality that the country is being treated as an operational battlespace. Crucially, these SMEs are often working directly for the US military rather than NATO or the Bundeswehr. Still, the German government actively lubricates this transition through state mechanisms, such as the Central Innovation Program for SMEs (ZIM), an R&D funding program managed by the Ministry for Economic Affairs (BMWK), and the Export Initiative for the Security and Defense Industry.
Ultimately, Germany’s defense conglomerates, and now even its Mittelstand, have become the maintenance contractors of NATO’s infrastructural occupation. They are paving roads, writing source code, and producing dual-use goods that determine how future wars are fought. This ensures that alliance obligations subsume logistical, industrial, and digital sovereignty, and that the steel-hard casing remains profitable, efficient, and firmly locked.
However, the re-engineering of Germany is not limited to physical goods or digital code. It involves a fundamental geopolitical imposition: the designation of the Federal Republic as the primary command node for the US-NATO alliance in Europe.
IV. JSEC and the American Command Presence
Within this architecture, Germany’s geography dictates its destiny. The country has become the Drehscheibe Europas, the revolving axis through which the matériel of a crumbling empire moves.
This role was institutionalized in Ulm in 2018 with the activation of the NATO Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC). JSEC serves as the rear area command for the entire European theater. Its specific function is to secure the space behind the potential front lines, ensuring that troops and ammunition can move freely from Atlantic ports to the Eastern flank without bureaucratic or physical friction. As JSEC defined its own mission in 2020:
“Specifically, JSEC is responsible for protecting, securing, and coordinating troop and materiel movements of the NATO partners in all directions... JSEC provides a secure environment across multiple domains to protect NATO forces and installations from harm while ensuring freedom of action.”
It essentially manages the logistical choreography of the continent, synchronizing the flow of resources to NATO’s Joint Force Commands (JFCs). These JFCs, situated in Brunssum, Naples, and Norfolk, are the operational warfighters executing campaigns on the front lines. JSEC’s job is to ensure they never run dry and never run out of supplies.
However, the specific choreography is being directed by an American choreographer, gradually but surely. The U.S. Army recently initiated plans to significantly expand its presence at JSEC in Ulm, a move driven by the need to bolster the so-called Reinforcement and Sustainment Network (RSN). While the number of American personnel is set to rise from approximately 20 to 50-70 over the next three to five years, the qualitative impact of this increase is not to be ignored. It allows the U.S. to align the command’s output directly with American strategic priorities and without any pretensions.
US officials have been blunt about this relationship. As one planner noted in a US Army article in 2024, JSEC’s role at the operational level is to essentially serve as the “middleman to enable force projection and setting the theater.” Or, in other words, a middleman could be seen as a proxy. The official further clarified that JSEC’s primary tool is the
“series of roads, rails and interconnected waterways – the air, ground and sea lines of communication connecting from North America all the way to the eastern border of NATO.”
This statement should strip away any illusion of European strategic autonomy or sovereignty in any shape or manner. Germany’s infrastructure is explicitly viewed as the continental extension of North American supply lines to reach the so-called eastern flank.
To make this international flow physically possible on the ground in Germany, the Bundeswehr Operations Command (Operatives Führungskommando or OpFüKdoBw), newly established on October 1st, 2024, serves as the indispensable national interface. According to the “Osnabrück Decree,” this command reached its full operational capability on April 1, 2025, marking a structural paradigm shift in the history of the Federal Republic. The decree explicitly merges two previously separate spheres: “Command of Foreign Missions“ and “Territorial Defense.” Under this single roof, the distinction between external expeditionary warfare and internal homeland security is administratively dissolved: a bureaucratic confirmation of the battlespace concept where the front line is everywhere.
While JSEC plans the movement across borders, the OpFüKdoBw is the entity that executes it within them. However, its mandate extends far beyond logistics; it acts as a shaping force on the state itself. The Ministry of Defense explicitly states that the command “provides military advice to decision-makers in politics and administration.” In practice, this means the command functions as a conduit for militarizing political will, ensuring that civilian leaders align with the necessities of the alliance, aka NATO, and by extension, transatlantic goals. This is an honest admission: the military (or NATO in sheep’s clothing) is now shaping policy, rather than just executing it, which is nothing less than the reversal of the democratic process.
And coming back to the OPLAN DEU: the command is formally responsible for the “continuation and implementation of Operationsplan Deutschland (OPLAN DEU).” To this end, it coordinates closely with federal ministries, state security agencies, municipalities, and civil actors to fend off “hybrid threats.” As evidenced by recent operations such as Baltic Sentry, the command maintains a continuous situational picture and synchronizes German contributions with NATO in real time.
Its ultimate stated goal, in the Ministry’s own words, is to:
“ensure the functionality of the ‘Drehscheibe’ (Turntable/Hub) of Germany in the event of conflict and war.”
Thus, the subordination of civil society, the coordination of every railhead, bridge, and fuel depot to NATO’s tempo, is the command’s central mission statement.
However, the command architecture outlined above is not a floating abstraction, even though it reads like one; it is, instead, and lamentably, anchored geographically in German soil. These are concrete facilities surrounded by roads and cables, where local infrastructure is being re-engineered to serve their specific metabolic needs. This exposes a dangerous structural dependency: while JSEC formally operates under a NATO flag (albeit with openly rising US influence), it relies entirely on national infrastructures that have been subordinated through interoperability standards. German communications, data systems, and logistics planning must now adhere to NATO technical protocols, effectively aligning them with the U.S. Army’s AUNP 2.0 specifications. Here, the “steel-hard casing” becomes digital, yet remains just as impenetrable as administrative sovereignty dissolves into procedural compliance, and “coordination” becomes a polite euphemism for subordination.
V. The Kinetic Sovereign: American Firepower on German Soil
To view JSEC and the German commands in isolation, however, would be a mistake. Their role is to serve as logistical enablers for the projection of kinetic power, which remains firmly in American hands.
The nerve center of this system lies in Wiesbaden and Mainz-Kastel. Here, the U.S. Army’s newly established 56th Theater Multi-Domain Command forms the European node of a planetary network. The creation of this command was the culmination of a deliberate escalation timeline that continues to escalate.
It started in late 2021 at Clay Kaserne in Wiesbaden. On September 16, the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) was activated with the mandate to “integrate cyberspace, space, land, sea, and air operations into one fighting unit.” Less than two months later, on November 8, the Army reactivated the 56th Artillery Command, a unit with historical meaning. During the Cold War, this was the headquarters for the Pershing missile forces. Its resurrection signals a clear return to the logic of nuclear-adjacent brinkmanship.
By July 10, 2025, these two strands, the futuristic cyber-warfare of the MDTF and the long-range firepower of the 56th, were fused. In a ceremony at Clay Kaserne, they were merged into the single 56th Theater Multi-Domain Command. General Christopher Donahue, overseeing the Army in Europe, described the new entity like this:
“We’re the test bed.”
Germany is thus the laboratory for this new form of warfare. Unlike traditional garrisons, this command fuses land fires, military shorthand for long-range precision missiles launched from the ground, with the invisible architecture of cyber, space, and electronic warfare. It achieved its first operational proof of concept during the Avenger Triad exercises in November 2025, coordinating attacks across all domains in real-time “with the goal of reestablishing the borders of the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line”.
The MDTF in Germany is a node in a global circuit. There are no signs of US American retreat. Just as the 1st MDTF in Washington State focuses on the Pacific and China, the 56th in Germany focuses on Europe and Russia. Indeed, while Germany is already deeply embedded in this development in the European theater of war, Japan will be the next location for the 4th MDTF, scheduled to be operational in 2028 for the Pacific theater.
In essence, Germany functions as a hub, a testing ground, and a probable target. Brigadier General Steven Carpenter summarized the US American mission hidden within this network with this hubris-filled sentence:
“What we do in this theater of operations is exportable anywhere. That should concern our adversaries.”
This quote reveals the reality of all the abstract doctrines. Indeed, what we are seeing here is a division of labor manifested in material reality: The German military moves the trucks (JSEC), the American command identifies targets and fires the missiles (56th/MDTF), creating a total battlespace.
However, these command capabilities also need to be backed up by steel. As confirmed in a July 2024 joint statement, the United States confirmed it would “begin episodic deployments” of 2nd MDTF’s “long-range fires capabilities […] in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future.” This includes the Typhon missile system and, later, the Dark Eagle hypersonic weapon.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius described the Typhon deployment as an “interim solution”, a “bridge” between a temporary U.S. presence and the development of European systems. But through the lens of Giorgio Agamben, we recognize this rhetorical trick: the “interim” measure is the classic vehicle for a permanent state of exception.
By hosting the Typhon, a conventional ground-launched missile with a range exceeding 1,600km, a capability no other European NATO power (save Turkey) possesses, Germany is locking itself into a fatal kinetic dependency. Without American hardware, Germany lacks the physical capacity to strike deep targets; with it, Germany becomes the primary launchpad for American escalation. Thus, the “bridge” Pistorius speaks of does not lead to European autonomy; it leads deeper into the Atlanticist fold, cementing the Federal Republic as a primary target in any potential conflict.
Ultimately, through these processes of externally imposed militarization of space, Germany has been upgraded into a conduit, a scalable platform within a planetary system of organized violence, where American command structures operate with an autonomy that renders the surrounding German sovereignty increasingly ornamental.
Arcane Thunder: A Case Study in Entanglement
To understand how this abstract steel-hard casing of dependency and subordination functions in real-time, and to witness the inescapable entanglement of those caught within it, we need only look at Exercise Arcane Thunder 25.
Conducted simultaneously across Poland, Germany, and Arizona, this operation offered a terrifying demonstration of time-space compression. In a matter of seconds, real-time data from high-altitude balloons hovering over the American desert was transmitted to command nodes in Wiesbaden, processed by AI-assisted algorithms, and relayed to allied shooters in Poland.
What once required hours of diplomatic and tactical coordination now unfolds in minutes through the AUNP-enabled network. Major General John Rafferty hailed this instant transmission as “the biggest breakthrough.” Yet, the breakdown provided by Colonel Patrick Moffett of the 2nd MDTF reveals the true nature of this hierarchy: US Navy unmanned surface vessels identified targets, passed coordinates through the US-controlled all-domain operations center in Germany, and handed them to Polish partners for the final engagement.
This is the operational reality of an Internationalized Kill Web: Arcane Thunder revealed the true meaning of multi-domain: naval drones, Army sensors, commercial high-altitude platforms, and European ground forces are woven into a single, data-driven targeting cycle.
But what this just one example of current and ongoing exercises shows is that this division of labor cements the dependency. The United States provides the network, the operating system, and the command architecture (the brain); European partners supply the territory, the logistics, and the trigger pull (the body). Germany hosts the control room where intelligence from satellites, social media, and civilian communications converges into actionable targeting data. Once this fusion occurs, when military networks utilize civilian infrastructure to direct foreign fire, the boundary between national defense and total societal mobilization does not just fade; it is deleted. And this is what is most dangerous about these developments.
VI. Cognitive Integration
If Operationsplan Deutschland provides the physical skeleton of this new structure, initiatives such as Federated Mission Networking (FMN) and the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI) provide the neural pathways. Through these programs, German forces and industries are woven into the same protocols and software architectures as their American counterparts. And on the most foundational level of communication: Each system must speak the same digital language; each headquarters must think within the same doctrinal grammar. The price of interoperability is absolute dependency, where every byte transmitted through the shared network confirms the hierarchy of command embedded within it.
At the inaugural LANDEURO 2025 symposium in Wiesbaden, organized by the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) with support from U.S. Army Europe and Africa, Richard Creed, Director of the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, articulated this precise mechanism of cognitive alignment. Emphasizing the strategic necessity of a shared linguistic framework, he stated:
“We work together and train together every day over here in Europe... Let’s use the same words and make sure those words have the same meaning.”
On the surface, this statement appears harmless, pragmatic, even. After all, what is the problem with using the same words? How else can forces effectively cooperate? Yet, this logic obscures a dangerous process of entanglement. As we demonstrated in Part I and Part II, doctrine is not neutral; it is derived from ideology and rooted in a specific worldview. When allied officers “use the same words,” they adopt American operational concepts encoded in American doctrinal frameworks. This is the steel-hard casing manifested at the semantic level: when meanings align, national planning and processes of militarization mirror the hegemon’s framework and goals by default.
The FMN initiative formalizes this cognitive architecture at the digital level, promising faster, secure data sharing across security domains. Yet in practice, it ensures that European militaries think, plan, and act within an American-designed environment. The European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), which Germany leads, extends this logic to procurement. Twenty-one nations have joined the program to build a continent-wide air- and missile-defense grid. However, by prioritizing the purchase of the Patriot (U.S.) and Arrow 3 (Israeli-built but U.S.-integrated) alongside the German IRIS-T SLM, the initiative functions as a consolidation of the transatlantic market. Marketed as “European sovereignty,“ ESSI actually deepens vertical integration into the U.S. defense ecosystem. It is procurement as alignment: a Biedermann-esque act of funding the very wall that encloses one’s own horizon.
From Infrastructure to Doctrine: Sovereignty as Procedure
In the configuration presented above, sovereignty becomes, at best, procedural. The Army’s Unified Network arrives in Europe through German rails, ports, domes, and cables, yet the communication standards, encryption keys, and cloud environments remain resolutely American. What alliance documents call ‘interoperability’ functions in reality as command through infrastructure. Worse, it is a form of infrastructural occupation without armies, control without flag-planting or official decree. This surrender is not accidental; it is born from generations of politicians, entrepreneurs, and military personnel who have been encased in this same worldview, ideologically bounded by a crumbling empire. Thus, their submission feels natural to them, perhaps even like the fulfillment of a civilizational mission. Hence, the garden and the jungle…
What Germany embodies in physical form, the “Hub” or Drehscheibe, NATO now extends to the entire alliance as doctrine. The transformation of national space into networked function signals a fundamental cognitive realignment. Planners in Norfolk and Mons no longer speak of “peace” and “war” but of pervasive competition of hybrid threats and the grayzone, a continuum where every field of human activity is a potential battlespace. The material networks binding Germany into U.S. command structures find their conceptual twin in NATO’s foresight analysis that renders confrontation a structural condition.
Germany’s geographic centrality, once a liability between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, has mutated into strategic dependency. Its prosperity relies on trade routes secured by alliances whose military structures it hosts but cannot direct. OPLAN DEU plans for accommodating 800,000 troops whose command Germany integrates into but does not control. Rheinmetall profits from convoy contracts serving armies pursuing objectives its parliament cannot veto. The 56th Theater Multi-Domain Command coordinates kill chains extending from Arizona to Poland through Wiesbaden, distributing targeting data according to priorities set in Washington.
This is an occupation through a network, achieving what territorial conquest never could: total integration into imperial infrastructure under the banner of partnership and cooperation. It creates dependencies too expensive to abandon, wrapped in a sovereignty too constrained to exercise independently. Germany functions as the continental node in a planetary command architecture. It becomes essential and vital for operations it cannot refuse, (temporarily) profiting from a mobilization it cannot stop, and administering strategies it cannot redirect.
Each of these elements, Operationsplan Deutschland, JSEC, the 56th MDC, Rheinmetall, Framework Nations, the adoption of US army doctrine, and Sky Shield, appears discrete, technical, and defensive. Together, however, they form the Steel-Hard Casing, enabling what AUNP 2.0 calls “transregional and global” warfare. They transform the Federal Republic into the core infrastructure for planetary military engagement. At the end, it becomes a space where neutrality neither exists nor can exist, and where peacetime stands apart from the preparation for conflict.
The next section turns to this final cognitive dimension: NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis and its “Four Worlds” model. Having wired the continent into a permanent logistical circuit, the alliance now wires the imagination itself, closing the future around a single premise: that disruption is destiny and cooperation an impossible dream.
VII. NATO’s Strategic Foresight: The Panic of the Imagination
To understand the final layer of this steel-hard casing, we must correct a common misconception. While empires in their ascent conquer geography, empires in their decline consume themselves from the inside out, seeking to colonize the future as their final act.
We are witnessing a trans-Atlantic hegemon that is visibly crumbling, industrially hollowed out, economically fragile, and militarily overextended. Yet, rather than adapting its domestic economic model to improve the living standards of its own citizens or accepting a cooperative role alongside rising powers, the power elite’s response is a retreat into what we might call magical voluntarism. This is an ideological mission driven by transatlantic elites desperate to preserve their status, material wealth, and access to global resources. It is based on a colonial sense of superiority that refuses to acknowledge the material reality of the West’s decline. Instead, they retreat into a form of apocalyptic idealism: the belief that through sheer will, belief, and the rigid management of narratives, they can “win” a competition against the forces of history itself.
In this context, NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 (SFA 23) is a document of panic. Even though it tries to appear a sober piece of analysis, it is a cognitive blueprint designed to foreclose any future in which the West is not the dominant architect. To discipline this uncertainty, NATO offers four stylized scenarios: Fragmenting world (the current baseline), Pervasive competition, Global cooperation, and Better angels of our nature. However, the hierarchy of these worlds reveals the alliance’s pathology.
The planners explicitly discard the scenarios involving peace and cooperation, offering justifications that are startling in their honesty. Take, for instance, the rejection of the “Global Cooperation“ scenario (High Disruption / High Cooperation). This world would envision nations coming together to solve shared existential shocks. The SFA 23 dismisses it with the following logic:
“This scenario presupposes a significantly changing attitude to strategic shocks and disruptions and, eventually, to participating in the enduring adaptation of the RBIO [Rules-Based International Order]... by strategic competitors towards more cooperation. Such change would likely emerge initially as global responses [to] disruptive changes. The Allied foresight community did not explore this option, as it was not deemed probable amidst the Russian aggression against Ukraine and increasingly assertive behaviour by China. At the same time, avenues of a more cooperative international order should be explored, as a follow-on study...”
This passage is a confession. The alliance cannot conceive of a future defined by cooperation because it interprets the “assertive behavior“ of other nations, simply their refusal to be subordinate, or their desire to develop autonomously, as an inherent act of aggression. Because China and the Global South are rising (changing the material status quo), NATO concludes that cooperation is impossible. And where cooperation is impossible, peace becomes unthinkable.
Even the scenario labeled “Better Angels of Our Nature“ (Low Disruption / High Cooperation) is discarded after “initial testing,” with the document noting:
“This scenario has been discarded... considering the certainty of an increasing extent of disruptions and the lack of indicators for the positively changing attitudes of strategic competitors.”
Here, “positively changing attitudes“ is coded language for submission. The text assumes that for peace to occur, competitors must change their attitudes to align with Western desires. The possibility that the West might need to adapt its own stance to accommodate a multipolar reality is not even entertained. Because they refuse to cooperate with other powers (which would relegate the West to the status of an equal), they need to believe they can “win“ in a state of Pervasive Competition, the only scenario they deem “useful for planning.” Thus, the foresight analysts enforce a tunnel vision where the only rational path is total and indefinite mobilization.
This brings us to the underlying pathos of the document, which can be understood through the lens of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Fisher argued that “Capitalist Realism“ is the widespread belief that capitalism is the only viable system, acting as an invisible barrier that makes it impossible to imagine a coherent alternative. NATO’s foresight is the geopolitical equivalent of this phenomenon: an “Atlanticist Realism.“ The alliance suffers from a slow cancellation of the future, where the political imagination stagnates into the endless repetition of conflict. The rejection of the “Global Cooperation“ scenario is proof of this paralysis: the West finds it easier to imagine the total destruction of the world through “high disruption“ than to imagine the end of its own hegemony.
However, this is not a global phenomenon; it is a specifically Western pathology. This imaginative closure is the product of a modern capitalism born in the West, fused with a historical and social development that, as Max Weber might argue, has become the exclusive horizon of US and European elites. This is not the case in other latitudes. In the Global South, memories of different forms of organizing social reproduction and economic relations still exist; alternatives to this system have been attempted and are being worked toward.
But for the Western functional elites, those tasked with organizing the societies they are supposed to represent, the cage is shut. Caught in a self-serving cycle of self-selection, they are encased in a worldview incapable of processing equality. Thus, when they look at the horizon, they cannot see a multipolar garden; they see only a jungle. And because they cannot imagine an alternative to their own dominance, they would rather prepare for the end of the world. The inability to conceive alternatives produces apocalypticism as the only available horizon.
Summary: Imperial Deferral
If we pull the threads of this series together, from the abstract of Part I to the doctrines and strategies of Part II to the concrete steel of Operationsplan Deutschland in Part III, a distinct, coherent picture emerges. The West, in its declining condition, is building systems that ensure it never stops fighting.
We have dissected a unified machine of Imperial Deferral: Where Strategic Ambiguity functions as the temporal control of perception, keeping adversaries in a state of uncertainty. Where Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) serves as the tactical codification of attrition, erasing the boundaries between peace and war to create a “battlespace” that is everywhere and forever. Where Mosaic Warfare provides the operational recomposition of pressure, turning military force into a fluid, uncatchable swarm. Where the AUNP 2.0 acts as the infrastructural globalization of command, wiring the planet into a single US-controlled switchboard. Where the example of OPLAN DEU is the logistical materialization of this panic in continental Europe, converting sovereign nations into nothing more than transit zones for imperial projection.
Through these different strands, we see the mechanism of a networked occupation. This is an almost post-territorial imperialism where control manifests through the domination of flows of data, energy, and logistics. It is, to borrow from geographer David Harvey, a massive “spatial fix”, a desperate attempt to solve a crisis of capital accumulation by reconfiguring the geography of the planet into a militarized network.
However, this digital spatial fix contains a fatal contradiction. The construction of a global network of “pervasive competition” requires materials such as rare earths, chips, and energy that Western supply chains no longer fully control. Thus, the quest for network supremacy is materially impossible without the very adversaries the network is designed to contain.
This convergence reveals the ultimate truth: The U.S. is preparing to manage its own decline through global destabilization, in the hopes of finding something to stop the process.
The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 is the concrete implementation of the doctrine of panic. It wires the world for the “persistent,” “transregional” conflict that MDO requires and Strategic Ambiguity perpetuates. Here, a kind of creative destruction on a planetary scale emerges as a mechanism to halt the rise of a multipolar world and reset a global capitalist system in crisis.
NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 (SFA 23) confirms all of this. It is essentially a 20-year planning document for halting historical transition through military means. By defining multipolarity as a threat to Western elites’ civilizational identity, the West transforms its own anxiety into a systematic doctrine. The elite’s preference for permanent conflict drives the inevitable outcomes they claim to objectively analyze. NATO’s “most likely” scenario, Pervasive Competition, becomes self-fulfilling not because rival powers choose confrontation, but because Western elites cannot psychologically accept any scenario that does not justify their institutional existence.
When we speak of “Elite Panic” we do not mean sentimental dread. As C. Wright Mills noted, elites act out of institutional interest. This is a material panic (falling profit rates, lost access to resources), a geopolitical panic (the rise of the non-aligned), and an ideological panic (the collapse of the “End of History”). Their anxiety is the cold calculus of a class sensing its historical sunset.
As the NATO Strategic Foresight video warned: “The time is now.”
They are right. The time is now. But what they are unleashing is the weaponization of time itself: a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable arrival of a world they do not own anymore.
Closing Notes: The Imperial Sickness Unto Death and Despair
In the end, how do we diagnose a part of a civilization that would rather risk planetary incineration than accept the status of an equal? To understand the psychology of the steel-hard casing and the men like Manfred Weber, Friedrich Merz, and the planners at the Pentagon who lock us inside it, we must look beyond sociology and into the realm of existential pathology.
We must turn to the synthesis of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of despair and circle back to Max Frisch’s satire of complicity.
In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard defines despair not merely as sadness, but as the “inability to die.” He writes:
“The despairing man cannot die... the sickness and its torment... consist in not being able to die.”
This maps with terrifying precision onto the condition of the American Empire. It is an empire that has reached its historical conclusion but refuses to expire. Trapped in a kind of living death, it persists in increasingly desperate and destructive forms, Mosaic Warfare, Grey Zone conflict, Cognitive Warfare, unable to transform, yet unable to conclude.
Kierkegaard identifies a specific form of this malady: the despair that is “ignorant of being despair.” It is a condition where the self refuses to acknowledge its own sickness, fleeing from the truth of its situation because acknowledging it would require a fundamental transformation.
This maps remarkably onto the condition of the Biedermann.
In Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers, the protagonist Gottlieb Biedermann knows that his guests, Schmitz and Eisenring, are arsonists. They tell him directly. They store gasoline drums in his attic. They measure fuses in front of him. Yet Biedermann refuses to know what he knows. This is what Kierkegaard calls “not willing to be oneself.” Biedermann wills himself to be rid of the self that would have to act, the self that would have to break with bourgeois politeness and confront the arsonists.
It is here that the connection to our analysis of NATO’s Strategic Foresight lies.
Biedermann can imagine that his house will burn down; he worries constantly about “the arsonists in the news.” Similarly, Western functional elites can imagine nuclear war, civilizational collapse, and the end of the world, their SFA 23 document is full of such nightmares. But like Biedermann, they cannot imagine acting otherwise. They cannot imagine themselves as the kind of people who share power, who decline gracefully, or who break the rules of their own hegemonic world.
This is the true “Panic of Imagination.” It is not a failure to foresee the apocalypse; it is a failure to imagine an alternative self.
Western elites suffer from a Kierkegaardian collapse of possibility. Their imagination is captured, colonized by the conventions of their own supremacy. They can visualize the end of the world, but they cannot visualize a world where they are not the masters.
The play’s devastating final moment, where Biedermann hands the arsonists the matches, is thus a perverse inversion of Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith.” The leap is supposed to be the moment of authentic self-constitution, where one commits to something beyond the merely given. Biedermann “leaps,” but he leaps into complicity, into his own destruction.
This is what Kierkegaard calls “Demonic Despair”: the defiant refusal to be saved, a willing of one’s own destruction because transformation is more terrifying than annihilation. The Biedermann is the figure of unconscious despair in the political sphere, one who knows the fire is coming, yet hands over the matches because he cannot imagine becoming someone who would act otherwise.
This is not just cowardice or ignorance; it is a spiritual sickness. The self has so thoroughly identified with its hegemonic form that it would rather burn than transform.
NATO’s strategic foresight apparatus exhibits precisely this Biedermann logic. It can imagine every catastrophe except the transformation of its own position. The matches, the forward-deployed Typhon missiles, the militarized corridors of OPLAN DEU, the triage protocols of the battlespace, are handed over with the same mixture of denial and complicity.
They call it deterrence. Yet, we should call it despair willing itself unto death.
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If this mapping of the steel-hard casing clarifies the scale of the enclosure we face, then the task of understanding all these processes becomes all the more urgent. The conversion of our public space into a “battlespace” should not be a classified debate for security specialists alone; it is a framework that seeks to organize our collective reality into a permanent state of exception.
Your critical engagement is the first step in breaking the Biedermann-esque silence. Leave a comment—corrections, counterpoints, sources, or leads for future work are always welcome.
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Nel
Brilliant 👌 The so called "European elites" are totally descending into suicidal madness...
Thank you Nel. Instead of falling into deep depression, I try to think of the one thing Jacques Baud has often said: "The best form of defence is to get on well with your neighbours". NONE of this terrible buildup made of lies and fearmongering by the "EU" especially the unpopular "leaders" of France Germany UK, treating NATO as if were not the obsolete remains of Cold War rhetoric, is useful for anything but war and waste.