Why is Germany trying to build ‘Europe’s strongest conventional army’?

German men over the age of 18 were required to fill out a questionnaire to prove their readiness for military service at the start of the year thanks to a law passed last month.

The government can now elect to join the army on voluntary basis in order to achieve its goal of creating what it claims will be Europe’s first and strongest army since World War II. However, the law allows for mandatory service under the law.

Active duty personnel in November reached 184, 000 soldiers, a 2,500 increase from the army’s May 1st speech to the parliament, where the Bundeswehr, or “the strongest conventional army in Europe,” were needed.

According to Timo Graf, a senior researcher at the Bundeswehr Centre for Military History and Social Sciences in Potsdam, “It’s already the strongest force they’ve had since 2021.”

With generous salaries and benefits, the government is tempting those who choose to serve in voluntary service for 23-month contracts. The terms of those contracts may then be extended to professional indefinite service.

They will end up with something like 2, 300 euros ($2, 700) after taxes and deductions because housing is free and medical insurance is free. There is a lot of money available, according to Graf.

Germany has pledged to double its reservists to 200 000 and increase its active duty members to 260 000 by 2035. At the conclusion of the Cold War, it would have a half-million-strong army.

Moscow has been dissatisfied by the news.

Sergey Nechayev, the country’s ambassador to Germany, stated in an interview last month that “Germany’s new government is speeding up preparations for a full-scale military confrontation with Russia.”

However, from the German perspective, Russia’s refusal to leave Ukraine has fueled the political will to spend 108 billion euros ($125bn) this year, which is equivalent to 2.5 percent of GDP, and more than twice the budget for 2021, which is 48 billion euros ($56bn) for reconstruction.

We now support an increase in defense spending from 58 percent to 65 percent in a year, according to Graf.

Germany will invest 3.5% of its GDP in defense by 2030.

Eight out of ten Germans now believe Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t serious about reaching a peace deal with Ukraine, according to a poll conducted by Politbarometer, a German election platform and television program in December. Many also believe intelligence officials’ warnings that Russia plans to eventually expand its war to NATO nations.

According to Graf, “2029 has been portrayed as a potential target for Russia’s attack on NATO,” and that has become the point of reference. Over the past four years of this conflict, we have been “sleepwalking,” he said. Here, the future of Europe is in question.

Germans reject Trump’s US administration.

Russia’s perception of a threat is just one side of the equation. Over the past year, German society has found that German society’s loss of faith in the United States has been equally transformative.

Germans were surveyed on June 2025 by the state channel ZDF. “Will the USA continue to support Europe’s security as a member of NATO?” 73 percent of respondents said no. This majority was up 84 percent by December.

Germans now fear the obvious support of far-right, Russia-friendly parties, as it did in Germany’s federal election in February of last year, and nine out of ten of them view US political influence in Europe as perverse.

According to the far-right in Europe, the US president’s National Security Strategy, published last November, warned that the continent was facing “civilisational erasure” as a result of Brussels’s over-regulation and “migration policies that are changing the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and the suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

General Ben Hodges, who once commanded US forces in Europe, said, “They’ve realized Trump has no interest in helping Germany at all.” He claimed for Al Jazeera, “The National Security Strategy was terrible… it was a gigantic middle finger from Trump to Europe.”

Germans have such a low level of trust in Washington that three out of ten would prefer to see it replaced with an Anglo-French deterrent.

The idea of a European NATO is shared by those who value NATO and those who support it, according to Graf. Germans still believe in NATO as a military force, but they also believe that they do not trust Americans to participate in NATO and that they do so in favor of a European NATO.

Graf reported that Bundeswehr polls showed a rise in support for a European army, which was always unsure in Germany and for which NATO was expressly built in 1949, by 10 points to 57% in the last year.

Will Germany perform as promised?

Merz’s commitment is not recent.

In 2022, the same year that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his predecessor, Social Democratic candidate Olaf Scholz, had also promised to build Europe’s strongest army.

However, Scholz only started trickling down once more, in 2024, after parliament approved a one-time, $ 120 billion boost to defense spending.

Some people believe there were also cultural obstacles during Scholz’s government at the time, but others attribute this to bureaucratic practices.

Nobody in their right mind would choose the Bundeswehr as a career because it was not widely perceived, so why. Therefore, it would be more of a niche activity, perhaps more for those on the right side of the political spectrum, said Minna Alander, a researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis with a focus on security and defense.

General Hodges, who now resides in Germany, said, “Well-educated Germans and older Germans grew up hearing about how terrible Nazi Germany was.” The absolute worst nightmare for older Germans who were children during the war would be a conflict with Russia or the United States, according to the author.

Since 2022, however, perceptions have rapidly changed.

Merz rose to power, demanding “independence” from the US, and condemning both Moscow and Washington.

Parliament had already approved a suspension of the constitutional deficit’s limits, giving him an enormous, permanent increase in defense spending by the time he took office. Parliament last month approved roughly $60 billion worth of defense procurements.

We never rely on European procedures, he says.

Analysts predict that pro-Kremlin narratives will continue to try to exploit any pre-existing latent skepticism.

Russians are incorporating sensibility over conscription into their propaganda narratives for many different European societies, according to Victoria Vdovychenko, a hybrid warfare expert at Cambridge University’s Center for Geopolitics.

You’re going to see a spike in news about how bad it is that the Germans are sending the kids to be killed, she said, according to Al Jazeera.

She is also concerned about how long it will take for political will and investment to become industrialized and forceful.

Although Scholz vowed to form a brigade to defend the Suwalki gap, a vulnerable piece of Lithuanian land sandwiched between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a Russian-held territory in the Baltic Sea, it is still undergoing recruitment, training, and training.

Source: Aljazeera