BERLIN, Germany — When Chancellor Angela Merkel took office after her re-election last fall, she promised to expand her country's role in world affairs by unshackling its military.

That would reflect the political and economic leadership position Germany has taken in Europe over the last two decades.

But as the fight against the Islamic State, or IS, in Iraq and Syria is showing, that's easier said than done in a society that’s been a perennial conscientious objector since World War II.

Germany’s commitment to send $90 million worth of arms and equipment to Kurdish rebels fighting IS ended a longstanding policy against sending weapons into conflict zones. But the amount and nature of aid isn’t expected to grow.

That’s angering German hawks who are pushing Berlin to join US-led air strikes and dramatically expand efforts to train and equip those fighting IS in Iraq and Syria. But Merkel is constrained by a general unwillingness to take a direct role in the conflict as well as a crisis in the weapons industry.

“There's still great reluctance and resistance to [Germany's] arms sales to the Kurds, and there would be very strong opposition to joining the fight against IS,” defense expert Michael Brzoska of the University of Hamburg said in a telephone interview.

Over the weekend, local newspapers published the first photos of German troops training 32 Kurdish fighters at a military school in Bavaria.

A group of tough-talking ex-generals took that limited involvement as less a PR opportunity than a case of “those who can’t do, teach.”

“Our allies are flying combat missions against IS to protect our common security,” Harald Kujat, former inspector general of Germany’s Federal Defense Forces, told the tabloid Bildzeitung.

“But Europe's largest economy and one of the most important members of NATO is unable to act.”

Former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was more blunt. “We let others do our dirty work in Iraq,” he said.

Some are warning that the reluctance to fight may have broader consequences, especially after two well-publicized breakdowns of military planes ferrying troops to Iraq and aid to West Africa last week, which prompted criticism of Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen.

The breakdowns have been blamed on a reliance on aircraft that have been in service for 50 years.

Germany's unwillingness to fight is spawning an inability to fight, says Rainer Arnold, a Social Democrat member of parliament.

Deep cuts to the defense budget have rendered NATO's would-be leader in Europe unable to meet its military commitments to the alliance, he says.

Germany spends less than $42 billion, or 1.3 percent of GDP, on its military, far below the 2 percent NATO says its members should lay out.

Instead of a lean fighting force, schizophrenic cost-cutting has resulted in an army that's equipped neither for a quick-hitting modern conflict like the fight against IS nor the large Cold War operations for which NATO was originally designed.

Meanwhile, toy-happy decision makers have unwisely slashed the maintenance budget to protect new procurements, Brzoska says.

“If you look at the equipment that the German military has,” he says, “there's no clear line what the armed forces think they're for or clear rationale behind what they're purchasing.”

At the same time, new government policies are targeting customers in other countries.

Germany's reputation for precision engineering has helped its defense industry emerge as the world's third-largest arms exporter, behind the US and Russia.

But last month, Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel unveiled plans that threaten to deliberately strangle Germany's arms makers with strict new limits on exports.

An ongoing shift of those exports from other countries within the European Union to new customers with dubious human rights records in Asia and the Middle East is incompatible with Germany's postwar commitment to peace, Gabriel said on German television.

The restrictions could send the country's weapons makers looking for greener pastures, the head of the German defense industry lobby warned.

"Either we will continue to reduce capacities and thus jobs as well or we'll go abroad," Armin Papperger, president of the Federation of German Security and Defense Industry, said in a recent interview.

Hamburg University's Brzoska doesn’t believe Germany is necessarily hitting a wall in steering from its past to a more influential future.

Taken together, the move to restrict arms exports and decision to arm Kurdish fighters in Iraq represent a shift toward using weapons transfers as a tool for Germany to become a bigger player in foreign affairs, just as Merkel promised, he argues.

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Ethical concerns will remain the nominal justification for blacklisting particular countries. But the days of blanket opposition to supplying arms to countries in the middle of conflicts may be over.

Instead, Germany will treat its defense industry like the US, the world's leading arms exporter despite a lengthy list of countries that are banned from receiving American-made weapons.

“If a country is cooperating with the US, they will get lots of arms,” Brzoska says.

“That's what the [German] reform is all about," Brzoska says. “To move away from focusing on making money to focus more on the goals of German foreign policy.”