Germany rebuilds its ranks

Germany’s military has reached its largest size in 13 years – and is still growing. Earlier this month, the Bundeswehr, the country’s armed forces, announced it had 186,705 active troops, having added roughly 3,700 over the last year. Germany’s armed forces have slowly ticked up after a sharp decline following the 2011 decision by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to suspend mandatory national service.

This recent growth is part of a much larger ambition: in May of last year, Chancellor Friedrich Merzannounced plans to build the strongest conventional army in Europe in response to a growing threat from Russia following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These threats are now compounded by doubts about US security guarantees under US President Donald Trump, who withdrew 5,000 troops from Germany earlier this year after Merz criticized Trump’s war in Iran.

“We must be able to defend ourselves so that we do not have to defend ourselves,” Merz said when he first announced the plans. “Our goal is a Germany and a Europe that are so strong together that we never have to use our weapons.”

In April of this year, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced the Bundeswehr’s first military strategyindependent of NATO,titled “Responsibility for Europe,” which set out plans to expand its armed forces to 460,000 soldiers ready for combat by 2035, with 200,000 of them in reserve. The personnel growth targets were considered ambitious at the time, with Pistorius himself admitting that recruitment would be a challenge, in a climate of high employment and an aging population.

But these new numbers put the Bundeswehr within its 2026 target range of 186,000 to 190,000, and it expects this figure to grow as the year progresses. It also reported “new record highs” in applications and recruitment this year, in part due to a new mandatory registration and screening for military service, which may have increased visibility for careers in the armed forces.

Beneath all this, Germany – the largest economy in Europe – is significantly ramping up its defense spending, which is set to account for a third of its federal budget - more than €190 billion ($221 billion) by the end of the decade. By contrast, France’s defense budget should reach €76.3 billion ($89 billion) by 2030.

With Russia’s war in Ukraine looking unlikely to end any time soon, and as Russia increasingly tests Europe’s defenses with hybrid warfare techniques, Germany is rebuilding its ranks to deter what Berlin views as its biggest external threat in decades.