Time to bring back military conscription
Dear Reader,
Once again, Germany has been rudely awakened from its lazy afternoon snooze.
First, it thought it could buy cheap Russian gas without bearing the costs of deterring a belligerent, cash-rich Moscow from doing anything stupid. Now, it has thrown a hissy fit after the country it outsourced its security to has decided that it isn't prepared to pay the bill anymore.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything else from a country of tenants, who see the landlord as being responsible for seeing to their every need, and yet are indignant when he tells them that he is raising their rent.
You can shout and scream at the landlord until you're blue in the face. Or you can ask why, when you are the third-richest country on the planet, you allowed yourself to slip into a situation in which someone ripping up a contract is all that prevents you from ending up on the street.
At any rate, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Trump’s first election win in 2016, full-on war in Ukraine since 2022, and Trump’s second win in 2024, the message finally seems to be sinking in that it would be a sensible thing for Germany to be able to defend itself.
Earlier this week, chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz announced that he would be spending several hundred billion euros on defence, something that looks likely to push the military budget north of three percent of GDP.
That should be enough money to purchase lots of shiny new tanks, frigates and fighter jets. Yet, an equally pressing question remains unanswered: who will man all those vehicles?
After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the defence ministry said that it wanted to raise the number of soldiers in the army’s ranks from 183,000 to over 200,000 by the end of the decade. Since then, the number of active fighters has actually fallen.
Despite the defence ministry investing millions of euros in advertising campaigns over recent years, young Germans are reluctant to enlist to fight.
As part of this campaign, the army has opened recruitment centres in dozens of inner cities. I visited one such centre in downtown Berlin last summer in the hope of finding young men interested in enlisting - but the office was deserted and looked like it hadn’t been open in months.