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Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, vowed last week that the country will build “the strongest conventional army in Europe.”
It comes as Germany and others adapt to the drive for European countries to rapidly rearm in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — but contrasts with recent decades when the country has preferred soft power over military strength.
So, how feasible is it for Germany to be the continent’s biggest military power?
“For now, the money is there, and Germans have deep pockets,” Ulrich Kühn, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Business Insider.
“What is missing is a general cross-party consensus on the issue, including the left wing of the governing Social Democrats, who are more skeptical of projecting military power,” he said.
Last month, Germany announced that it was deploying troops to Lithuania on a long-term basis—the first long-term deployment of German soldiers to another country since World War II, another sign of its changing military approach.
Kühn added that the commitment to increase Germany’s defense spending “can only be the beginning if the goal is really to position itself as Europe’s defense champion.”
“What the German arms industry needs are long-term contracts well into the 2030s and state subsidies to rapidly scale up production,” he said.
As of May 2024, Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr, had 180,215 active-duty personnel.
Jörn Fleck, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, told BI that a targeted increase of the German armed forces to 200,000 had been delayed until 2031 “due to lackluster recruitment and an ageing force.”
But he said that Germany “has taken important initial steps to rebuild the German military into one of Europe’s leading conventional forces.”
Fleck cited a €100 billion special fund to modernize the military, announced in 2022, and constitutional changes to partially exempt defense spending from Germany’s debt brake, which was imposed after the 2008 financial crisis and limits the deficit to just 0.35% of GDP. By contrast, the US deficit exceeded 6% last year.
But Fleck warned that Germany “will have to overcome two if not three decades of underinvestment in its armed forces.”
“The resulting force reductions, readiness problems, capability gaps, and infrastructure challenges will take years to reverse,” he added. “They will not be solved by money alone and will require sustained political will and leadership.”
One positive for Germany is its thriving defense industry, which includes major players like Rheinmetall and KNDS, along with medium-sized companies and innovative startups.
In 2024, Rheinmetall saw sales related to its defense business increase by 50% year-on-year.
Germany’s defense industry strategy, focused on key technologies, greater economies of scale, and the potential of the European market, is a “positive step in the right direction,” Fleck said, but he added that the country will “have to fundamentally reform its procurement agency and processes” to boost its defense industry.
He also said that advancing Germany’s military capabilities will move the needle across Europe, given the country’s political and economic weight on the continent.
This has already been visible when it comes to the REARM initiative that opened the door for countries to spend more on defense, and the proposal for common EU borrowing to fund joint development and procurement.
“If Germany, Europe’s reluctant hegemon with its fraught history, can get its act together on defense,” Kühn said. “So can others.”
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