Análisis World Politics Review, 14.08.2026 Moritz S. Graefrath, profesor ayudante (U. de Oklahoma) y académico (Eurasia Group)
Last year, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced his intention to turn the country’s armed forces into “Europe’s strongest conventional army.” Since he came into office, Merz’s government has been outspoken about the need to reduce Europe’s dependence on an increasingly unreliable United States and prepare the continent to face the Russian threat without Washington’s aid. Against this backdrop, the publication in April of Germany’s new military strategy document, which laid out ambitious targets for rapidly expanding German defense capabilities, has been widely heralded as yet another sign that Berlin is determined to carry much of the burden of continental defense.
A look beyond this rhetoric, however, reveals a country still far off from turning its proclaimed vision of becoming a serious military power into reality. For months, both German officials and the general public have engaged in an intense debate about one of the key components in Berlin’s rearmament efforts: increasing the size of the Bundeswehr, as the German military is known. So far, the government has bet on a voluntary military service model, but that has failed to hit its recruitment targets.
It will therefore soon be forced to choose between two unattractive alternatives: implementing mandatory military service, or effectively giving up on its current recruitment targets. Which path Germany will choose is far from obvious—and will reveal more about Berlin’s view of the world than any speech or strategy document.
Germany’s official recruitment targets are ambitious. According to its new military strategy document, the country hopes to increase its armed forces to a total of 460,000 combat-ready troops by 2035. This is a staggering number, given that the Bundeswehr currently comprises only about 180,000 active troops as well as some 60,000 reservists. The size of Germany’s armed forces sharply dropped after the government suspended compulsory military service in 2011, and the urgent need for more troops was an obvious argument for a return to conscription.
Yet, Berlin chose otherwise. After months of intense debate within the government and across German society over whether to bring back some form of compulsory service, Merz’s coalition government decided at the end of 2025 to double down on voluntary recruitment instead. The Military Service Modernization Act, which took effect on Jan. 1, eschewed implementing any form of mandatory military service and instead focused on improving the Bundeswehr’s outreach efforts. Specifically, it mandates that all 18-year-old German men from now on must answer a questionnaire assessing their motivation and suitability for military service, as a way to improve recruitment targeting.
By now, however, it has become clear that this bet on a voluntary service model has failed from a recruitment standpoint. About five months after the new system launched, out of nearly 300,000 questionnaires sent to young Germans, only around 530 people had voluntarily signed up for military service. By contrast, the number of people who have registered as conscientious objectors has exploded. In the first half of 2026 alone, about 6,000 people declared their refusal to perform military service for moral or religious reasons, approaching the number who did so in 2024 and 2025 combined.
That the voluntary military service model is struggling to yield recruits is largely due to a pronounced generational divide within German society. Young Germans, the key targets for military recruitment, remain particularly opposed to the idea of serving in their country’s military. New opinion data from the Liz Mohn Foundation show that while a majority of young people believe that Germany should do more in the areas of security and defense policy, and many agree that the country needs to increase its defense capabilities, few of them express any real interest in joining the armed forces themselves. Put simply, there is widespread agreement that something needs to be done, but few want to be the ones doing it.
Berlin will soon be forced to choose between two unattractive alternatives: implementing mandatory military service, or giving up on its recruitment targets.
This is not particularly surprising. There are arguably few countries in the world that embraced the idea of a post-Cold War “end of history” like Germany did. Collectively, German society, and especially those raised after the fall of the Berlin Wall, rejected the idea that military power constitutes an integral tool of statecraft as an outdated relic of the past. That the continent might once again become the site of a deadly conventional war became unthinkable. By now, of course, reality has caught up with these notions, but ideas like these do not lose their grip overnight, and they make recruiting this generation for the armed forces a tough sell.
It is hard to believe that the German government did not see these problems coming when it opted to retain its voluntary model. As I argued in these pages at the time of the decision last year, it was relatively clear that it would not lead to the kind of recruitment boost envisioned by and necessary for Germany’s military plans. A more plausible explanation is that the German government itself had little faith in the approach to begin with, but saw it as a way to postpone the difficult choice of whether to bring back conscription, which would create significant domestic opposition; or giving up on its recruitment targets altogether, which would undermine the government’s security agenda and perhaps alienate allies.
A time of reckoning is now approaching and will force German leaders to confront this dilemma head-on. How they will resolve it is far from obvious. The government’s official line has always been that the Bundeswehr would rely on voluntary recruitment for as long as possible but return to some form of conscription if this failed to yield the desired increase in troop numbers. Accordingly, a growing number of observers now believe the government will soon change course and reintroduce compulsory service, perhaps as early as next year.
These predictions, however, rest on the expectation that Berlin genuinely believes—and will continue to believe—the two premises that produced its ambitious rearmament and recruitment targets in the first place: that Washington is and will remain an unreliable security guarantor; and that unless Germany rearms, Russia will threaten its vital interests.
On both counts, there are reasons for skepticism. First, although the relationship between Washington and Berlin has clearly soured since Trump’s return to office last year, German leaders’ “trans-Atlantic habit” remains a powerful force. For all their public posturing about the beginning of a post-American era of European security and the inevitable need to take over the burden of their own defense, many leaders still harbor hopes for a return to the trans-Atlantic harmony of decades past that allowed them to rely on American capabilities and thus rendered rearmament unnecessary.
Second, while officials have time and time again stressed the imminence of the Russian threat, their assessments may yet change. After all, the war in Ukraine has revealed the limits of Russia’s military might, severely degraded its forces and strained its economy. What is more, the Russian threat to Western Europe is far more remote than it is along NATO’s eastern border.
How Berlin resolves the current recruitment crisis, then, will reveal whether it really believes its own rhetoric. If Merz’s government is serious about the need to work toward European strategic autonomy and truly worried about the Russian threat, Germany will soon return to military conscription. If it does not, and the government effectively gives up on its vision to build the continent’s strongest conventional army, that would suggest its rhetoric lacks serious conviction.
