https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/04/22/can-the-germans-fight (A)
ON A PLANE to Düsseldorf recently Carsten Breuer, the head of Germany’s armed forces, met a passenger who wanted to thank him and his troops for their service. It is a scene he might once have imagined only in America, beams the general, demonstrating the new respect the Bundeswehr enjoys among Germans.
The story is telling in a second way. Mr Breuer’s predecessors as inspector-general, as Germany’s most senior soldier is officially known, would probably not have been recognised at all. But Mr Breuer’s regular appearances on television and in newspapers have made him a familiar face. Germany is embarking on a once-in-a-generation rearmament, and the general has made a priority of communicating the need to restore the armed forces to an uncertain public. “It’s absolutely the time to go public with what we are doing,” he says.
General Breuer (pictured, below) is speaking to The Economist to mark the publication of the first military strategy in the history of the federal republic, along with a “capability profile” for the Bundeswehr. These are the latest staging-posts in the transformation of a fighting force that, as the then army chief said after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, was “more or less empty-handed”. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, vows the Bundeswehr will become “the strongest conventional army in Europe”.
The strategy, much of which remains classified, describes the features of modern warfare that will guide the Bundeswehr’s development: a “transparent” battlefield demanding data primacy; cheap, unmanned systems produced at scale; and hybrid attacks below the threshold of open war. It lays out capability targets designed to give the Bundeswehr “technological superiority” by 2039, including in deep-precision strikes. Staggering sums will be borrowed to fund this expansion. By 2029 Germany has pledged to meet the nato spending target of 3.5% of gdp, and its defence budget could exceed €160bn ($188bn). It will have left Britain and France in the dust (see chart 1).
Most importantly, the strategy signals a pivot from a Germany that once ran down its military means, while muttering platitudes about European co-operation, to one boldly taking leadership among allies. “We are not doing this only for ourselves,” says the general. “We are doing this for the sake of Europe.” Eyebrows have been raised, notably in France, which worries about Europe’s rearmament being shaped by a country still groping its way towards a strategic culture and which is still wary about deploying troops to fight. But most allies welcome Germany’s conversion. “In all my conversations I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘We are suspicious about what you’re doing in Germany’,” the general says. Pentagon officials are said to be delighted.
Will the money be spent wisely? Critics, said to include Mr Merz, worry that too much will go on tanks, jets and other legacy systems, and not enough on the r&d or next-generation technology which has proved its worth in Ukraine. Much has simply backfilled the neglect of previous years, acknowledges the general. But this is needed as a foundation on which more innovative weaponry can be built. “You call them legacy systems, I call them gap-fillers.” As for Ukraine, the general calls the war “a teacher, not a blueprint”. His ambition is to import Ukraine’s rapid wartime innovation cycles to peaceful Germany.
One challenge is to improve a procurement system notorious for delays and legal requirements so onerous they lead to vast cost overruns. When General Breuer took over in 2023, he says, “We had procurement processes designed to procure almost nothing,” and a generation of officers better at closing barracks than replenishing weapons stocks. New rules have improved matters, he insists, citing a “lightning-speed” procurement of loitering munitions from March to December last year.
Another test is to find the 260,000 troops needed to meet Germany’s nato obligations by 2035, up from today’s 185,000, as well as building a reserve of 200,000. A new law obliges men turning 18 to fill out a questionnaire assessing their readiness to enlist. But most think Germany will have to eventually consider reintroducing the draft, which was suspended in 2011. This could mark the first occasion for serious public resistance to rearmament. A survey by the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences finds a small majority of Germans in favour of conscription for young adults—but not among young adults themselves (see chart 2).
“Russia is creating the conditions for a war against nato,” warns the strategy. A less clearly expressed worry is over the role of America. (China is not mentioned.) General Breuer notes a “strategic dilemma” for European countries that know they must accept responsibility but aren’t yet able to take over capabilities from America. “There has to be a roadmap,” he says. But as Donald Trump flirts with quitting nato, critics fear a Bundeswehr conceived in 1955 as an alliance army will struggle to cope with a chaotic American withdrawal. That is not plan A, says the general. But “I would not be a military leader if I did not think through different scenarios, including the worst-case scenario.”
Even the strategy’s central scenarios require an independent German approach to deployments. Is Germany really kriegstüchtig (“war-ready”), as Boris Pistorius, the defence minister, puts it? Two recent European proposals—a “coalition of the willing” to police a notional Ukraine ceasefire, and a naval mission in the Strait of Hormuz—are driven by Britain and France, with Germany’s role uncertain. “We focus on collective defence, and on homeland defence. Crisis-response operations are secondary,” says the general. “That may be different from the UK, the US and probably France. But Kriegstüchtigkeit is about showing that deterrence works”.
