Why now? Can Germany actually rebuild a serious military? And will it happen in time for Europe to check Russia on its own?
Germany’s “Overall Concept for Military Defense” outlines a three-stage plan. By 2029, the nation aims to have a military ready to defend Europe against Russian aggression. By 2035, it wants its armed forces to be equipped and capable across all domains in line with NATO’s capability targets. And by 2039, German policymakers want their country to produce cutting-edge military technology.
Publishing a defense strategy would not be noteworthy for most large nations. Advanced militaries regularly set out spending priorities, the capabilities they aim to acquire, and what threats they seek to deter. Congress mandates that the U.S. government produce a National Defense Strategy every four years, and Western militaries, such as Britain and France, have published similar documents at semi-regular intervals.
But for modern Germany, “this is something remarkable,” Markus Ziener, a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told TMD. Scarred by memories of Nazi militarism, the country has largely avoided taking part in overseas military interventions, with Germany’s foreign ministers proudly speaking of its “culture of military restraint.” When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed an armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel—the most influential European leader of the 2010s—was largely silent. Germany not only refused to supply weapons to Ukraine but also blocked other countries from transferring German-made arms.
That posture is now gone. Pistorius and Germany’s chief military officer, Inspector General Carsten Breuer, have made the term Kriegstüchtig—“war ready”—their slogan. Using the word Krieg (war), which carries an exclusively martial connotation in German, may have shocked German citizens even a few years ago. Now, large majorities of Germans see Russia as a threat and think military spending should be increased; about two-thirds favor increasing the size of the country’s armed forces.
Those political shifts are reflected in three key areas: money, machines, and manpower.
In 2025, Germany’s military budget of $114 billion was the largest in Europe and the fourth-largest in the world. In 2026, it plans to spend a record high of $129 billion. Much of that funding will come from loans, after chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz in March 2025 pushed a constitutional amendment through the outgoing Bundestag to exempt defense spending from the limits of the country’s “debt brake.”
Germany is in a “quite privileged fiscal position” compared to Western European peers like France and Britain, Stefan Mair, the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told TMD. Germany’s general government deficit ran at 2.7 percent of GDP in 2025—considerably less than Britain or France—leaving Berlin meaningful room to absorb new defense spending.
And though the Bundeswehr’s procurement system has been infamously sluggish—Breuer has described it as “designed to buy almost nothing”—the Merz government has pushed through a series of reforms to fix that. The Planning and Procurement Acceleration Act, passed by the Bundestag in January, allows the government to award no-bid contracts to start-up military suppliers and preemptively excludes non-EU bidders where national security is at stake. The government has also signed 111 billion euros ($130 billion) worth of weapons contracts since 2022.
The result is a Bundeswehr increasingly equipped to fight on a modern battlefield. Berlin has ordered 12,000 kamikaze drones from Germany-based start-ups Helsing and Stark Defence, and the country’s largest defense contractor, Rheinmetall. Through the Build with Ukraine initiative, launched in December 2025 with a 2 billion euro ($2.3 billion) German subsidy, Ukrainian drone manufacturers are co-producing battlefield-proven systems on German soil. And with the new strategy document, the German government plans to spend billions building out a satellite constellation for command-and-control and reconnaissance—capabilities most European militaries currently borrow from the United States.
What Germany is buying matters as much as what it isn’t. Significant portions of French and British military spending go toward expensive systems—nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, ballistic-missile submarines—that Germany has no intention of building. Instead, the government is concentrating on long-range strike capacities, air defense (particularly using drones), and large ground-based forces.
By 2035, Germany wants to have 260,000 active-duty troops and a reserve of 200,000, a drastic increase from the current levels of around 185,000 soldiers and 60,000 reservists. If its armed forces were at target levels today, Germany would have one of the largest militaries in the European Union, second only to France. The government says it intends to meet those targets through voluntary recruitment, claiming applications are accelerating. Last year saw 25,000 recruits, the best annual intake since mandatory military service was suspended in 2011.
In his press conference, Pistorius said that conscription would serve as a fallback plan for the government. There was a minor political outcry when, earlier this month, German media reported that military-age males would have to seek government permission to leave the country for more than three months.
Despite Germany’s decades of anti-militarism, Mair argued that conscription was unlikely to become a hot-button issue, as it was rarely controversial in West Germany during the early Cold War. “I expect that people will get used to it again,” he said. Ziener also noted that a national sense of responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust may also lead to a greater willingness on the part of Germans to check Russia. For many Germans, rearmament is part of a national responsibility “to not have that again,” he told TMD.
Germany is also not acting alone in beefing up its military. French President Emmanuel Macron has accelerated his planned defense buildup, pulling forward a 64 billion euro ($75 billion) annual defense budget to 2027 instead of 2030. An updated military programming bill now before parliament would add another 36 billion euros ($42 billion) over the next four years, much of it for munitions, drones, and ground-based air defense. Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—whose combined defense spending more than doubled between 2020 and 2025 to $53.7 billion—have collectively reactivated forms of conscription, run their largest civil-military exercises since the Cold War, and pledged to meet NATO’s new 3.5 percent of GDP spending target.
Perhaps most crucially, Poland’s government has announced plans to have 500,000 regular troops and reservists ready to serve by 2039. “So much of the conventional defense and deterrence in Europe will be built on a sort of German-Polish capability,” Paul Van Hooft, a researcher at RAND Europe, told TMD.
But even as Berlin and its allies build out conventional strength, Russia forces have been probing European defenses. In some ways, “their deterrence has already failed,” Liana Fix, a senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told TMD. Multiple Russian sabotage attacks, targeting arms manufacturers, logistics hubs, and rail IT systems, have taken place inside Germany in recent years, and Russian drones regularly probe NATO air defenses. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned in an interview with the Financial Times last week that Russia could strike a NATO member in “the short term—months rather than years,” and that he was no longer confident the United States would respond if it did.
“Russia could blackmail Germany” with the threat of long-range missiles, Fix said, by threatening to strike targets deep inside the country unless it withdrew troops from the Baltics, or stopped aiding Ukraine. Only by quickly developing its own missile strike capabilities will Germany be able to counter such threats, she said.
Most European leaders, not just Germany’s, are also planning for a world where the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. U.S. officials privately informed European allies that some weapons shipments would be delayed because of the Iran war.
And President Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force have not been forgotten. “I don’t think Greenland has been recognized sufficiently, if at all, by American observers,” van Hooft said. “That was a threat to an ally. That one really changed a lot for most Europeans.”
The dual threats of Russian aggression and U.S. inconsistency seem to have galvanized Germany’s leaders. While he declined to answer questions directly about the U.S. at his press conference, Pistorius told reporters that, for NATO to continue, the alliance would have to become “more European.”
And in an interview, Breuer emphasized that Germany aims at preserving peace on the continent. “We are not doing this only for ourselves,” he said. “We are doing this for the sake of Europe.”