During the final two decades of the Cold War, many observers considered the West German military, the Bundeswehr, to be the most capable land force among the European NATO allies. Highly professional and extremely well trained, the German land forces, like the entire German military, benefitted from defense expenditures that by 1988 amounted to more than 3 percent of the country’s GDP. And with an economy that was the largest in western Europe, West German defense spending was greater than that of all other NATO members, apart from the U.S., the U.K. and Turkey.

The end of the Cold War resulted in a precipitous decline in defense expenditures on the part of a now-united Germany. Faced with the need to integrate the population of the former East Germany into its extremely generous welfare system, and with no clear threat to its security, Berlin’s spending dropped below 2 percent in 1992 and continued to fall until it reached a low of 1.07 percent in 2005. The following year, at its Riga summit, NATO formally agreed that member states would commit to spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. German spending rose that year — but only to 1.2 percent.

The paucity of German spending on defense manifested itself in the increasingly poor state of German military readiness. By 2010, the German Army’s once-vaunted Leopard tanks were suffering from low availability, as significant numbers were in storage or........

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