“My division commander and I pushed a bit in our chains of command for the deployment of the 414 Tank Battalion because we felt that this would put our integration to the test,” the 43rd Mechanized Brigade’s commander, Brig. Conveniently, the 1st Panzer Division is based in Oldenburg, some two hours by car from the 43rd Mechanized’s home in Havelte. In 2014, the Dutch Army was about to lose its remaining few tanks, which would have rendered the 43rd rather impotent.
The Dutch 43rd Mechanized Brigade, for its part, is one of the Dutch Army’s three combat brigades.
The 1st Panzer Division is one of three German Army divisions. They’re the first permanently binational contingent to deploy as part of Enhanced Forward Presence, the NATO battlegroups dispatched to Poland and the Baltic states as a deterrent against Russia. The 414 Tank Battalion comprises both German and Dutch soldiers, some 300 of the former and 100 of the latter, and they’ve been serving in Lithuania since July last year. 9, a pioneering military unit finished an equally pioneering rotation as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania. They’ll discover that it works, but they’ll also learn that it involves painstaking efforts even when just two like-minded countries are involved. Other countries should learn from the Dutch-German integration. In a first anywhere in Europe, a binational unit consisting of Dutch and German soldiers is about to complete a NATO deployment. Other countries, trying to show European military muscle of a different kind, are sending weapons to Ukraine and troops to neighboring NATO countries.īut away from the spotlights, the Dutch and German armies are pulling off spectacular integration. French President Emmanuel Macron recently proposed a new European security pact, which joins his long-standing proposal for a European army.
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