To Procure or Not to Procure: The German Parliamentary Debates on Armed Military Drone Policy

Abstract

In Germany the acquisition of armed military drones for the Bundeswehr has been one of the most controversial security policy decisions of the past decade. In 2012, the Defense Minister and the Bundeswehr publicly stated that they wanted armed drones. But this demand was met with strong opposition in the parliament and elsewhere. What followed was a very long and messy policy-process. Eventually, about a decade after Germany had acquired large, unarmed drones, the result was to lease (but not buy) five “armable” (but not armed) drones. How do we make sense of this? How did the use of armed military drones emerge as a political option in the German parliamentary debates 2009-2019? In order to answer this research question, this dissertation takes a discourse-analytical approach. The analysis of the parliamentary drone debates comprises well over 500 text documents drawn from the online archive of the German Bundestag. The concept of a “discursive ecosystem” allows to shed light on the dynamic interaction of a discourse with its context, including both ideational and material structural conditions in theorizing. As a research procedure, the author traced how the German parliamentary debate on military drones developed over time by conducting a qualitative in-depth analysis of the debate content, examining the represented meanings-in-use of drone warfare, the articulated policy options, and the discursive constructions of Germany’s role in the world. An epilogue briefly describes the developments after the main observation period until the fall of 2021, when the newly elected government decided to allow drone armament and strikes under certain conditions. The analysis shows that the parliamentary drone debate was highly complex, emotional, and politicized. However, armed drones slowly emerged as a political option due to the gradual normalization of drone technology, a lack of new arguments, shifting discursive dominance, a new constellation of parliamentary agents, revised party positions, and influential trends and events within the discursive context.