Colonel (ret) Wolfgang Richter is an Associate Fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the GCSP. He has been working as a security analyst after retirement from military service in 2010. From 2010 to 2022 he was a Senior Associate with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin. His research areas and numerous publications cover the European security order including the role of the OSCE, NATO-Russia relations, territorial conflicts, conventional and nuclear arms control, and military strategies. He also published policy papers on the use of armed drones and the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. In 2009, he contributed to the Independent International Fact Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (IIFFMCG).
In his military career as a general staff officer in the German Federal Armed Forces he dealt with strategic planning, nuclear deterrence and conventional defence concepts, military tasks and structures of the Bundeswehr, and arms control issues. Educated at the Führungsakademie in Hamburg he served in various command and general staff functions, inter alia, as Chief of Staff of a German Airborne Brigade (1985-87), planning staff officer in NATO Headquarters SHAPE (1987-89) and the German Ministry of Defence (1993-95), commander of a Motorized Rifle Regiment of the former National People’s Army after the unification of Germany (1991-93), and head of the conventional arms control division of the Bundeswehr Verification Centre (1999-2004). He was posted as a delegate to the CFE negotiations in Vienna (1989) and as a senior military advisor to the Permanent Representations of Germany to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the UN Disarmament fora in New York (1995-1999) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) (2005-2009). There, he represented Germany in the Joint Consultative Group on the CFE Treaty.