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In the past, when the party landscape was still clear, the rule of thumb was: The Union is the party of officers, the SPD that of NCOs.

Today the political situation in the armed forces corresponds to that in society: it is diverse.

The CDU and CSU at least claim to be "parties of the Bundeswehr".

It is debatable whether their policies do justice to this.

But it is no longer even in dispute that the SPD is about to give up its role as a serious creative force in the field of defense policy and to say goodbye to the Bundeswehr as a target group.

The chairman Norbert Walter-Borjans has just made this very clear.

After ten (!) Years of discussion on the question of whether the armed forces should be equipped with armed drones, he wrote in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" for the record, "together with large parts of the SPD membership and many other groups involved in peace politics" to consider the previous debate as insufficient.

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It's as transparent as cowardly.

Transparent, because Walter-Borjans wants to trim the SPD to green-red-red in terms of security policy with a view to the election campaign in the coming year: Skepticism about drones, rejection of nuclear weapons in Germany, rejection of the funding of the Bundeswehr promised in NATO.

It is cowardly because the SPD leader does not say bluntly and clearly that he is against drones, but insists on wanting to continue a debate that has been conducted down to the last detail.

There are no more new arguments, the SPD simply has to make a decision: to protect its own soldiers with this weapon system.

Or against it on the side of the left for fundamentally ideological reasons.

The social democratic egg dance around the drone fits in with the image of a parliamentary group that sent its defense commissioner Hans-Peter Bartels, whom the soldiers valued, into the desert and whose defense policy spokesman Fritz Felgentreu decided against running for the Bundestag again.

There are still a few realists on security policy in the group.

You now have to show whether your expertise is still in demand in the SPD.

Or whether they let Walter-Borjans lead the way.

"The line between defending the life and limb of our soldiers and killing with a joystick is very thin," said the SPD leader.

With this argument, the man must abolish quite a few weapon systems in the armed forces.