Germany's Rearmament: Has the Fiscal Bazooka Fixed the Bundeswehr?

‘I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.’ When Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said those words in 2011, during his first mandate, he was naming a paradox that has shadowed European security for more than a decade: a Germany with the economic, financial, and industrial foundations of a great power, yet unwilling to translate that mass into military weight.

As of 2026, Sikorski’s worry still holds. Berlin’s chronic failures to meet NATO defense-budget quotas, and its slowness to modernize its armed forces, have long threatened to weaken the alliance’s eastern members and the European continent as a whole. But in the past year a new factor entered the picture: the so-called ‘fiscal bazooka,’ a constitutional reform that finally unlocked the money to rearm.

One year on, it is worth checking back in with the European Union’s most populous nation. Has the bazooka set the German military on a credible path to rearmament, or has it gone off with all the explosive power of a wet fart? The answer is that the money is now real and historic in scale, but money alone cannot fix the things a generation of neglect has broken.

A Moral Endeavour

The fiscal bazooka reform was initiated in March 2025 by Friedrich Merz, then leader of the opposition. On May 6, more than two months after federal elections, Merz was elected Chancellor at the head of a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party. From the outset he made security and defense central to his agenda, framing the project as a ‘strategic cultural shift’—a transformation of Germany from a reactive, middling regional power into a leading, proactive, and reliable military actor in Europe.

To signal that commitment, Merz created a National Security Council within the Federal Chancellery, a first for post-war Germany. More substantively, he and his cabinet moved to ensure the military would receive the funding needed to meet NATO targets. The shift was as much rhetorical as fiscal, and Merz used the largest stage available to make the case.

On February 13, 2026, Merz opened the 62nd Munich Security Conference with a speech that amounted to a redefinition of Germany’s role in continental security. The international order based on rights and rules, he argued, had been ‘openly defined by power and great power politics,’ and that order, ‘however imperfect it was even at its best, no longer exists in that form.’ In plainer terms: we now live in a world where might makes right.

That has arguably always been true, at least since the first sharpened stick. But the underlying point was sharper. Since the end of the Cold War, Merz argued, European powers had delegated much of their ‘might’ to their larger NATO ally across the Atlantic. He still extended a hand to Washington, inviting the United States to ‘repair and revive transatlantic trust together.’

At the same time, he made clear that Germany was serious about investing in its own defense and becoming a regional power able to fight effectively alongside its allies, with or without American intervention.

The point was driven home by General Carsten Breuer, Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, who cast the build-up as a moral imperative. ‘Rearmament is not warmongering,’ he said. ‘It is the responsible action of nations determined to protect their people and preserve peace.’ Together, Merz and Breuer signaled an unambiguous political will to rearm, and the fiscal bazooka—which required a constitutional amendment—was meant to ensure the money would, in theory, be there.

But intent and funding leave the harder questions open. What role is Germany expected to play if war returns to the continent, and does it have the capacity to fulfill that role? As billions of euros pour into the Bundeswehr, can Germany muster the troops and the industrial base it needs? And even if every material element falls into place, will Germans be willing and motivated to take up arms? The future of NATO’s European pillar may hinge on those answers.

Operation Plan Germany

According to German defense officials, the alliance’s continental members may find themselves at war from 2029 onward, with the most likely adversary being Russia. By that date, Moscow’s military may have rebuilt enough strength to attack one of the Baltic republics, Finland, or Poland—a move that would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty and require every member state to come to the victim’s defense.

In such a scenario, the Bundeswehr would have several roles. The Navy would likely see action in the Baltic Sea, engaging Russian naval units or blockading vital ports such as Baltiysk. The Air Force would protect German airspace and join allies closer to the Russian border for forward strikes. In the very unlikely event that Russian forces overran Poland, the Army would defend the western banks of the Oder and Neisse rivers; otherwise, Army units would deploy closer to the front to support NATO partners.

One small German unit is already positioned in Lithuania as part of an Enhanced Forward Presence.

But the central role Germany is expected to play is that of a logistical hub and staging ground, coordinating and allocating reinforcements and supplies to NATO’s eastern borders. This is the purpose of ‘Operation Plan Germany,’ or OPLAN DEU, unveiled in November 2025. Its blueprints define in minute detail how 800,000 German and allied combat troops and support personnel would be mobilized and transported east, along with an enormous load of supplies, mapping every port, river, road, and railway needed to move that mass of people and equipment, and identifying the major nodes and how they would be protected from attack or sabotage.

OPLAN DEU was finalized in March 2023 by a team of planners under Lieutenant General André Bodemann, head of Territorial Command and the officer in charge of all homeland operations. The plan was initially kept secret, but there were good reasons to make it public. As one unnamed senior officer told the Wall Street Journal, ‘The goal is to prevent war by making it clear to our enemies that if they attack us, they won’t be successful.’ The deterrent logic is straightforward: convince an adversary that any attack will fail, and the attack may never come.

The snag is that OPLAN DEU’s meticulously crafted 1,200 pages may not survive contact with reality. Military exercises in September and November 2025 exposed serious flaws in Germany’s transport infrastructure and in the Bundeswehr’s ability to respond to unforeseen obstacles—flaws that no plan, however detailed, can paper over.

Crumbling Arteries: Roads, Ports, and Railways

Much of the infrastructure on which OPLAN DEU depends dates back to the Cold War. Berlin itself estimates that one fifth of the Autobahn network and more than a quarter of its bridges are in serious need of repair. Part of the fiscal bazooka is earmarked for infrastructure, but those improvements will take years to deliver, and a pothole that can stall a column of supply trucks is no abstraction.

Resupply by sea offers little relief. According to the federation of German seaports, the government would need to invest more than €15 billion to upgrade and reinforce docking facilities at Germany’s North Sea and Baltic Sea harbors. The railway network, meanwhile, is prone to serious mishaps—a point made not by exercises but by real-world events.

On February 25, 2024, a Dutch cargo ship accidentally rammed a railway bridge crossing the Hunte river in northwestern Germany. Operator Deutsche Bahn swiftly erected a temporary bridge—only for a second ship to ram the replacement that July. The damaged bridges carried the only rail link serving the harbor of Nordenham on the North Sea, at the time the only terminal in the region licensed to receive munitions shipments bound for Ukraine.

The dual ramming incidents choked vital supplies to Ukraine’s military for weeks. If a network depends on so few chokepoints in peacetime, the implications for a large-scale confrontation on NATO’s borders are alarming.

That fragility makes sabotage an ever-present nightmare. In recent years German railways have suffered acts of arson that may not be random vandalism: in October 2025, a Munich court jailed a man for planning to sabotage the rail network on behalf of Russia. Such attacks no longer require saboteurs on the ground—they can be carried out with drones.

Responsibility for shooting down suspicious or hostile drones over German territory long fell to police authorities, but a February 2026 amendment to the Aviation Security Act reassigned that duty to the military. Under the new law, the Bundeswehr is authorized to ‘shoot down drones if necessary in support of the federal states and state police forces if this is the only way to avert a particularly serious accident.’ The armed forces can do so thanks to recent acquisitions in November 2025 and February 2026—the DefendAir missile system, formerly the Small Anti-Drone Missile, and the laser-guided, low-cost ‘DroneHammer’ missile.

When the Convoy Walks: Lessons from Red Storm Bravo

At the end of September 2025, the Regional Territorial Command Hamburg conducted ‘Red Storm Bravo,’ a drill simulating the landing of NATO troops and their rapid deployment eastward. The military column was meant to travel continuously without a hitch. Instead, cracks appeared almost immediately. Long gaps opened between vehicles every time they crossed an intersection, delaying the entire convoy, while planners threw additional obstacles at the troops on the ground, including a simulated drone strike and a staged protest by anti-war activists.

The result was sobering: the Red Storm Bravo column covered less than 10 kilometers in two hours—a pace of about 5 kilometers per hour, the average walking speed of a healthy adult. A logistics operation meant to rush 800,000 troops to the front moved no faster than a brisk stroll.

And the exercise omitted one very realistic complication. If Russian forces made progress in, say, Poland, thousands upon thousands of refugees would likely cross into Germany, clogging its transport network. Railways, roads, and bridges would have to carry masses of armed personnel moving west-to-east while panicked civilians fled in the opposite direction.

As Claudia Major, head of trans-Atlantic security initiatives at the German Marshall Fund, put it: ‘Refugees and reinforcements would be pouring in from opposite directions. The flows would need channeling, which the Bundeswehr alone can’t do, especially while it’s fighting.’

Major’s point is that the Bundeswehr cannot do everything itself. That is why General Bodemann, the architect of OPLAN DEU, has taken preventive measures by enlisting the civilian sector. Hospitals, police forces, disaster-relief agencies, and the Autobahn operator will all cooperate with the military to ensure the smooth transit of both troops and civilian refugees in a worst-case scenario.

Private contractors have also been brought on board. Arms-manufacturing giant Rheinmetall, for example, will supply the government with €260 million worth of temporary camps equipped with showers, fuel stations, and field kitchens. Clearly the Bundeswehr will need far more than mobile showers to defend its territory—which raises the question of whether Berlin can foot the bill at all.

Big Bucks vs. Red Tape

Defense spending has always been a sore point for Germany, which has consistently failed to meet NATO’s targets. Through 2024, alliance members were expected to commit 2% of GDP to defense, with one fifth of that going toward equipment investment. After the Hague summit of June 2025, that benchmark was raised dramatically, from 2% to 5%. For years Germany had not just fallen short of the old target—it had barely roused itself, committing just 1.49% of GDP in 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed the trajectory. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the ‘Zeitenwende,’ or turning point, in foreign and security policy, pledging to raise defense investment and launching a special fund worth €100 billion. Thanks to that fund, Germany allocated €76 billion to defense in 2024—1.9% of GDP, very close to the NATO target—with some €15 billion going to equipment, satisfying NATO’s requirement.

The momentum has only built. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Germany had spent €92 billion on defense by the end of 2025. More striking still, a full €24 billion went to research, technology, and equipment—26% of the budget, smashing NATO’s 20% equipment target. The top beneficiary was the Air Force, with some €10 billion for procuring and maintaining aircraft; the Army and Navy shared a further €7 billion in new kit.

A substantial €4.2 billion went to a line item labeled ‘Command & Digitalisation,’ covering AI, quantum technology, satellite communications, and unmanned vehicles.

These sums may be dwarfed by Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, who spend in the hundreds of billions. But Germany now ranks as the world’s fourth-largest military spender, and the rearmament drive shows no sign of slowing. According to the Federal Ministry of Defense, the 2026 budget will exceed €108 billion, and by 2029 defense coffers are expected to hold €152 billion—roughly 3.5% of GDP. The ultimate goal is to hit the 5% ratio by 2035.

It is an ambitious plan, and a fair question is whether Berlin can deliver, given that Scholz’s special fund is due to run out by the end of 2027. Merz has addressed this through the fiscal bazooka itself. By reforming the so-called constitutional debt brake, which capped borrowing for defense, his government created a new Special Fund for Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality, known as SVIK, to keep the money flowing.

Can German Industry Keep Up?

Money is one thing; the capacity to spend it on real hardware is another. In theory, Germany’s formidable industrial sector should be able to supply the Bundeswehr with everything it needs. In practice, strong and proactive government intervention is required to ensure that legendary German engineering is put to good use.

On December 4, 2024, the government adopted the National Security and Defence Industry Strategy, designed to strengthen the national defense industry by encouraging independence, self-reliance, and innovation. As Defence Minister Boris Pistorius put it, ‘It is crucial for Germany’s defence capability to have our own innovative and efficient defence companies.’ The strategy unfolds across six fields of action: strengthening key technologies such as AI and unmanned weapons systems; linking civilian and military R&D and start-ups; diversifying supply chains while promoting procurement from local and EU vendors; reducing bureaucracy; attracting talent to the defense sector; and securing access to capital.

Yet commentators such as the Royal United Services Institute warn that the strategy may not quickly overcome Germany’s still-insufficient industrial capacity. The push to procure from German or European vendors makes strategic sense—a sustainable military benefits from a native defense base—but current capacity may not be able to deliver the quantity and quality the Bundeswehr requires. For now, that gap is being filled by purchasing material from, and expanding manufacturers’ operations into, other EU countries.

Another way to keep production at home would be to repurpose automotive assembly lines for weapons systems. That is appealing given that Germany’s once-legendary carmakers have been buckling under Chinese imports, which could tempt investors to divert capital away from the likes of Volkswagen and into weapons factories. But it is not so easy to kill two birds with one stone. Skilled automotive labor would need extensive retraining to shift from assembling Golfs and Cayennes to building Leopard tanks, factory conversion is far from cheap, and investors seeking bank support face a further obstacle—current regulation prevents many lenders from investing in defense companies.

Dr. Robert Brull, CEO of advanced-materials company FibreCoat, has highlighted a deeper flaw in a piece for The European: the procurement system itself may degrade the quality of equipment supplied to the Bundeswehr. In his view, the system is skewed toward a small group of well-established contractors with strong lobbying power.

Public officials accustomed to working with these firms may award contracts on the basis of familiarity rather than quality. ‘It’s not unusual for people to trust those they know well,’ Brull wrote, ‘but this moment calls for procurement decisions to be made on the basis of what will work best, not what feels familiar.’ The result is a system that can shut out creative, innovative, cost-effective newcomers before they ever become players—and even those allowed to compete may be discouraged by glacial testing and approval timelines and kilometers of red tape.

The Human Element

As it wrestles with procurement, the Bundeswehr also faces a chronic personnel shortage—though the military is working to fix it. In 2023, about 43,000 men and women enlisted. In 2024, the number of new applicants rose above 51,000, an increase of 18.5%, bringing the total of active troops to 181,174 by year’s end.

That figure was actually a slight decline from the end of 2023, which sounds counterintuitive given the surge in recruits. The explanation is attrition: several thousand troops retired in the intervening period, and the fresh intake could not entirely make up the shortfall. Germany’s is a voluntary force—it abolished conscription in 2011—and new generations may not be drawn to a life in fatigues.

That is why the government has considered reintroducing mandatory service, after a fashion. On December 5, 2025, the Bundestag approved a bill to boost the Bundeswehr’s numbers. Under the new law, voluntary service will be rewarded with better pay to make it more attractive. The aim is to grow the force from the current 183,000 to at least 260,000 active personnel and 200,000 reservists by 2035.

Only if the Bundeswehr fails to meet those quotas would parliament be able to activate conscription—and even then it would not be a universal call to arms. The idea is to ask all men within a certain age group to indicate their interest in service; only those who do so would face aptitude tests and recruitment interviews.

That leads to a deeper concern: is German society actually interested in, and willing to contribute to, defense? The political spectrum is divided, with parties opposing rearmament on both sides of the aisle. The most committed are Merz’s CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union. But their coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party, is split between hawk and dove currents.

The dove current is best represented by MP Ralf Stegner, who argues that a larger defense budget will crowd out social programs—and that disgruntled voters may then turn to the far right.

The most popular party in that space is AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, commanding 26% of the vote. Fiercely nationalist, AfD should have no objection to Germany becoming a regional military power, and its MPs did not oppose the December 2025 conscription bill. But the party objects to military aid for Ukraine and generally favors improved relations with Russia, including lifting sanctions on Moscow. It does not oppose rearmament per se, but rather rearmament against Russia.

A Nation Without a War Mindset

Even centrist voters may be lukewarm toward Merz’s reforms, as retired colonel Sönke Marahrens, now a fellow at Kiel University’s Institute for Security Policy, explains: ‘Germany’s strategic culture has been not to have a strategic culture. There is no war mindset, and many young people still don’t understand why we need a strong military.’ German voters, in his telling, care more about domestic issues than foreign and security policy, and even when aware of international threats they remain ‘ambivalent about the use of force.’

The data bear him out. A 2025 survey by the non-profit More in Common found that 74% of German respondents were concerned about war erupting in Europe in the coming years, and 66% believed Germany could and should no longer rely on US military assistance. Yet those same respondents were skeptical of Germany taking a leading military role in Europe, and only 29% felt that ‘military means may be necessary to resolve international conflicts.’ For Eastern Europe, watching from the front line, that is a frustrating disconnect.

A separate survey by the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences found that just 11% of adults under 50 would be willing to take up arms to defend their country. One in ten sounds alarmingly low—but the cold arithmetic offers a counterpoint: 11% of Germans under 50 equals roughly 1.8 million people, nearly four times the combined active and reserve target set for 2035.

The general mood, then, can be summarized as a somber realization that trouble may lie ahead. If it comes, most Germans will hope for a peaceful solution, and failing that, most will not take up arms enthusiastically. It is hard to blame them.

Conclusion: Prepare for War, Preserve the Peace

The honest accounting cuts both ways. Germany has, for the first time in the post-war era, married unmistakable political will to historic levels of funding—enough to make it the world’s fourth-largest military spender, with equipment investment that beats NATO’s benchmark. Yet that money runs into hard limits: crumbling roads, ports, and railways that no plan can wish away; an industrial base and procurement system riddled with red tape and favoritism; a force still short of troops; and a public that, while anxious about war, has little appetite to fight one.

The strategic case for rearmament, though, is not really about appetite. Building up a nation’s defensive capacity and capabilities—and letting a potential adversary know about it—remains the best way to prevent a war and preserve the peace. The fourth-century Roman writer Flavius Vegetius put it plainly: ‘Let him who desires peace prepare for war.’

German society and its representatives may stay divided on rearmament, and the nation as a whole may have no stomach for conflict. But if Germany can stomach preparing for one—seriously committing to it, and letting both its European allies and Russia see that it is serious—then it may never have to fight one at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Germany’s ‘fiscal bazooka’ and what did it change?

The fiscal bazooka is a constitutional reform initiated by Friedrich Merz in March 2025 that amended the so-called debt brake, which had capped borrowing for defense. The reform created a new Special Fund for Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality, known as SVIK, unlocking the money needed to rearm and fund infrastructure improvements. Germany spent about €92 billion on defense by the end of 2025—making it the world’s fourth-largest military spender—with the 2026 budget set to exceed €108 billion.

What is OPLAN DEU and why does it matter?

OPLAN DEU, or Operation Plan Germany, is a roughly 1,200-page logistical blueprint finalized under Lieutenant General André Bodemann and unveiled in November 2025. It details how 800,000 German and allied troops and support personnel would be mobilized and transported east to NATO’s borders, mapping every port, river, road, and railway. Germany’s central NATO role is as a logistics hub and staging ground, and the plan was made public deliberately to deter Russia by demonstrating that an attack would fail.

What infrastructure weaknesses did military exercises expose?

A September 2025 exercise called Red Storm Bravo, simulating rapid eastward deployment of NATO troops, found that a convoy covered less than 10 kilometers in two hours—walking pace—after gaps opened between vehicles at intersections and planners added simulated drone strikes and a staged protest. Separately, Berlin estimates one fifth of the Autobahn and more than a quarter of its bridges need serious repairs, and upgrading North Sea and Baltic Sea port facilities would require more than €15 billion.

Is Germany bringing back conscription?

Not immediately. A Bundestag bill from December 5, 2025, aims to grow the Bundeswehr from roughly 183,000 to at least 260,000 active and 200,000 reserve personnel by 2035 by making voluntary service more attractive with better pay. Only if those quotas are missed could parliament activate conscription, and even then it would not be universal — men of a certain age would be asked to register their interest, with aptitude tests only for those who do.

How do Germans feel about rearmament?

Public opinion is ambivalent. A 2025 More in Common survey found 74% of Germans concerned about war erupting in Europe and 66% believing Germany can no longer rely on US military assistance, yet only 29% felt military means may be necessary to resolve conflicts. A Bundeswehr Centre survey found just 11% of adults under 50 would take up arms to defend their country — though that 11% still equals roughly 1.8 million people, nearly four times the combined 2035 active and reserve target.

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