BERLIN — Germany wants a stronger army. It just doesn’t know who will serve.
Berlin’s incoming government, formed by Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), has released a coalition agreement outlining plans for a new voluntary military service to rebuild the overstretched and steadily shrinking ranks of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The plan involves sending a mandatory questionnaire to all 18-year-old men — voluntary for women — to assess willingness and fitness to serve. Those selected would be invited to enlist, but only if they choose to.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, an SPD politician who is expected to stay in his post in the new government, defended the approach as a pragmatic step forward.
“With a new military service, we will ensure both growth and staying power in the armed forces,” he said at a Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels last week. “We are making the Bundeswehr more attractive. That is both a prerequisite and a result.”
But without clear evidence of how many people would sign up under the plan, a warning light is already flashing inside Germany’s defense circles.
“If basic military service doesn’t manage to significantly motivate more young people to volunteer for the armed forces in the near future, the Bundeswehr will fall short of the necessary number of active soldiers and trained reservists,” said Christian Richter, a reserve lieutenant colonel and legal expert at the German Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, the Bundeswehr’s think tank.
“That would put Germany’s defense capability at risk — both in terms of national defense and collective defense within NATO. These two cannot be separated,” he said.
An army in steady decline
The Bundeswehr is already running thin. Troop levels have flatlined at around 182,000. More soldiers left than joined last year, and nearly a third of new recruits dropped out during training, according to the government’s yearly review on the state of the Bundeswehr.
It’s a challenge that’s rooted not just in recruitment numbers, but in decades of political decisions that pushed the military to the margins of society.
After a sweeping post-Cold War downsizing in 1994 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, military bases were shut down — especially in cities. With that, according to Carlo Masala, a professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich and an adviser to the military, the army faded from public life. “Their bases today are out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’s no direct contact for young people.”
That disconnect has only deepened in recent years.
Conscription ended in 2011. In 2018, the Bundeswehr’s recruitment campaign at the Gamescom gaming convention in Cologne drew backlash over a poster that read “Multiplayer at its best.” Critics accused the military of trivializing war and targeting teenagers. “Disgusting,” one user posted on X. “Trying to lure unaware gamers to the weapons.”
Earlier this year, the eastern city of Zwickau banned Bundeswehr ads from public spaces, calling itself a “city of peace” — although the municipal supervisory authority later found that decision was illegal. It’s against that backdrop — of fading visibility and political hesitation — that Germany is now placing its bet on a new, voluntary military service.
The window is closing
“We need these 100,000 additional troops immediately — and as quickly as possible,” General Carsten Breuer, Germany’s top military commander, told an audience at the German Council on Foreign Relations last week.
The broader, long-term goal is much higher. “The requirement on the table for Germany is 460,000 soldiers,” Breuer said — a figure that includes active forces, reservists and former soldiers Germany must be able to call up in a major crisis.
And that crisis may not be far off. According to Masala, 2029 has become Germany’s informal deadline — the year by which NATO and German intelligence expect Russia to have rebuilt enough conventional capability after the punishing war in Ukraine to threaten allied territory.
“That’s the planning horizon we’re working with,” Masala said. “If Germany waits until new infrastructure is ready, it may already be too late.”
To close the gap, the incoming coalition is betting on military service based on free will, modeled loosely on Sweden’s Totalförsvar, or “total defense,” system.
Richter called the plan to rely on volunteers and not a draft a political compromise — one that buys time, but not much.
“That’s why the coalition agreement included a compromise, stating that the new military service will ‘initially be voluntary,’” he said. “But given the scenarios being discussed, including a possible Russian attack on NATO territory as early as 2029, we don’t have much time.”
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