By Robbin Laird
In the spring of 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I completed our book, The Return of Direct Defense in Europe: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge. The book was built on years of field research across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and on extensive interviews with German generals, defense experts, and government officials during a visit to Germany in early 2019. Chapter Nine, which we titled “Germany as the Lynchpin State in Shaping the Future of Direct Defense,” laid out what we considered the most consequential and most uncertain piece of the European defense puzzle.
Germany, we argued, was at the center of everything — geographically, economically, and politically — yet was conspicuously absent from the serious work of rebuilding direct defense capability. West Germany had been the central pillar of European deterrence during the Cold War. But after reunification, and particularly after the shift toward out-of-area stabilization operations following the 1990s, the Bundeswehr had been progressively hollowed out. By 2020, Germany’s defense spending as a percentage of GDP had fallen to barely 1.2 percent. The institutional memory, the force structures, the hardened infrastructure, and the strategic culture required for direct defense had atrophied across an entire generation.
The central theme of that chapter and indeed of the book itself was that Germany’s transformation from a bystander into a genuine contributor to European defense was both necessary and unfinished. In April 2026, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defence released its first-ever Bundeswehr Military Strategy alongside the Bundeswehr Capability Profile, together titled The Overall Concept of Military Defence. These documents represent a genuine strategic watershed. They do not simply describe ambition; they constitute, for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, an integrated military strategy that connects threat assessment to force structure to capability investment over a defined timeline. Reading them against what we wrote six years ago is a clarifying exercise.
The Core Diagnosis We Offered in 2020
Our 2020 assessment of Germany rested on several interlocking arguments. First, the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea had functioned as a strategic shock, but Germany had not yet fully metabolized its implications. As Brigadier General (Retired) Rainer Meyer zum Felde told us, the German government’s 2006 White Book had declared that Germany no longer faced a direct threat from Russia. The institutional assumptions embedded in that document shaped force planning, procurement priorities, and political culture well into the following decade. The return of direct defense as a real operational requirement was understood by German military professionals long before it was accepted in the German political mainstream.
Second, the atrophy was structural, not merely budgetary. General (Retired) Egon Ramms, one of the most senior German officers of his generation, described to us the scope of what had been lost: the ability to conduct enduring defense operations, to provide host nation support, to sustain territorial defense of the German rear, and to operate as the logistics and force generation backbone for NATO in a crisis. Germany had given up the force structure of the 1970s and 1980s — the heavy formations, the hardened infrastructure, the depth — and replaced it with a force configured entirely for stabilization and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan or the Balkans. That force was not designed for deterrence against a peer competitor.
Third, the cultural challenge was as significant as the material one. Dr. Andrew Dennison, director of the Transatlantic Network think tank and a key interlocutor in our research, captured this directly: Germany needed to recognize that history and geography had not disappeared as key factors shaping its prosperity and security, and that creating a willingness among Germans to sacrifice for the broader European good required building a strategic culture that sees the world as it is, not as it was hoped to be. The comfortable assumptions of the 1990s that Russia had become a partner, that American engagement was unconditional, that European prosperity was self-sustaining had to be discarded.
Fourth, we highlighted the question of Germany as operational base, the nation’s role not only as a force provider but as the logistical and infrastructural hub through which reinforcements from the United States and other allies would flow in a NATO contingency. The decision to establish a new NATO logistics command at Ulm had been taken, but the actual implementation of Germany’s territorial defense posture remained deeply inadequate. One episode captured the problem vividly: a new Eurofighter logistics facility had been built above ground near Munich airport, because, as the responsible Luftwaffe general explained, hardening it would cost too much and besides, Germany was not likely to be attacked by Russia in a crisis.
Finally, we emphasized what we called the gap between recognition and commitment. There was broad expert consensus within the German defense community about what needed to be done. The conceptual work had been undertaken, the capability profiles written. But the political will to fund, field, and sustain the required forces had not yet materialized. As Lieutenant General (Retired) Klaus-Peter Stieglitz, former Chief of the German Air Force, put it: Germany needed to focus on providing an umbrella for new allies and to build the appropriate force, and the starting point was rebuilding territorial defense so that Germany could operate as a credible operational reserve for NATO.
What the 2026 Strategy Provides
The April 2026 documents address each of these challenges with a directness and institutional commitment that simply did not exist when we wrote in 2020. The opening declaration sets the tone. Germany’s ambition, stated unambiguously, is to become the strongest conventional army in Europe. This is not rhetorical flourish. It is a structured plan with phased milestones, a defined force structure target of at least 460,000 military personnel by 2035, and an integrated capability profile that aligns NATO Capability Targets with national objectives for the first time in Bundeswehr history.
The threat assessment in the new Military Strategy echoes and extends what the officers we interviewed in 2019 described to us. Russia is identified as the largest immediate threat to German and Euro-Atlantic security, one that is creating the conditions for a military attack on NATO and is already conducting hybrid operations against Alliance members including Germany. The strategy makes explicit what the 2006 White Book denied: that the boundaries of war have dissolved, that German society as a whole is a target, and that there are no safe havens from precise standoff weapons. This is precisely the threat environment we argued Germany needed to internalize.
The acknowledgment of what the document calls the “dissolution of the boundaries of war” is particularly striking. The strategy states that Germany’s adversary will deliberately undermine the distinctions between homeland and battlefield, civil and military, internal and external security, war and peace, and combatant and noncombatant. In 2020, this remained contested terrain in German political discourse. That it now appears as an explicit foundational premise of German military strategy reflects a genuine maturation in strategic thinking that we could only hope for when we were writing.
The treatment of Germany’s new strategic role is equally direct. The strategy acknowledges that the United States is shifting its strategic focus toward its Western hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, and that the 2026 American National Defense Strategy explicitly demands that allies take greater responsibility for their own security. The German response is to accept this burden deliberately rather than resist it. Germany will bear targeted strategic responsibility in and for Europe at the conventional level. From its position at the heart of Europe, it will increase cohesion between Eastern, Central, and Western Europe and maintain ties with North America. This is exactly the role we argued Germany needed to embrace in 2020, and which it had conspicuously avoided for the preceding two decades.
The Structural Answers to Structural Problems
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the 2026 documents is that they move from aspiration to structure. The Bundeswehr Capability Profile, acting as a Plan for the Armed Forces, connects threat assessment to force design in a way that previous German defense documents never achieved.
Three elements stand out.
First is the phased buildup framework. The strategy divides the development of the Bundeswehr into three phases running from today through 2039. Phase 1, running to 2029, focuses on maximizing inherent combat readiness and defensive capability with existing resources. Phase 2 develops Germany’s capacity to assume its European leadership role within the Alliance. Phase 3 achieves technological superiority and consolidates Germany’s role in the European security architecture. This is precisely the kind of structured, accountable roadmap that the officers we interviewed in 2019 described as necessary but absent. General Ramms and others told us that the conceptual documents existed but needed to be funded and fielded much more rapidly. The 2026 strategy answers that challenge with a genuine implementation framework rather than another aspirational white paper.
Second is the explicit treatment of the Germany-as-operational-base problem. The new strategy defines Germany as an operational base encompassing the territory, territorial waters, national airspace, and national data and communication networks, and commits to developing the military capabilities indispensable for maintaining that function. This directly addresses the concern we raised in 2020 that the logistical and territorial defense infrastructure required to support NATO reinforcement into the Baltic region and Poland had been allowed to decay. The establishment of the Lithuania Brigade as the first permanent Bundeswehr combat formation outside German territory is an expression of the same logic: Germany is not merely a rear-area logistics provider but a forward actor in Alliance defense.
Third is the treatment of what the strategy calls “quantity and quality.” We argued in 2020 that one of the core failings of post-Cold War German force planning was the systematic preference for exquisite, small, expensive forces optimized for out-of-area operations over mass, sustainability, and depth. The 2026 strategy confronts this directly. It argues that Germany must achieve a balanced mix of high-tech systems, existing systems, and low-cost mass-produced technologies, and explicitly warns against exhausting high-value systems against an adversary’s mass deployment of cheaper ones. This resonates closely with the analytical framework we have developed across multiple analytical contexts, the tension between what we call intelligent mass and exquisite scarcity, and it is significant to see Germany grappling with it at the doctrinal level.
The Cultural Dimension Revisited
In 2020, we argued that the hardest challenge facing Germany was not material but cultural. Dr. Dennison’s formulation that Germany needed to create a strategic culture that sees the world as what it is rather than as what we think it was captured something fundamental. The post-1990 German political culture had deeply embedded assumptions about the irrelevance of hard power and the sufficiency of diplomatic and economic instruments. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 did what the annexation of Crimea in 2014 had not quite accomplished: it broke those assumptions comprehensively and visibly, in real time, across German society.
The 2026 documents bear the imprint of that cultural rupture. Chief of Defence General Carsten Breuer opens his foreword with the statement that war has returned to Europe, and with it the realization that Germany must be prepared. This is not bureaucratic language. It is a declaration that the foundational assumptions of German defense policy since reunification no longer hold. The strategy describes Germany’s new role not as an exception or a temporary adjustment but as a paradigm shift. The language of Germany’s expanded leadership responsibility becoming the “pacemaker among European nations” in the words of Defence Minister Boris Pistorius would have been politically inconceivable in Germany in 2020.
The strategy also addresses the multi-temporal character of contemporary warfare in ways that reflect hard-won understanding from the Ukraine conflict. It acknowledges that deterrence and war preparations are carried out using state-of-the-art capabilities while actual warfare is conducted using the means and methods of yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the more distant future simultaneously. Innovation and adaptability are therefore critical to battlefield success. This is a considerably more sophisticated operational understanding than was present in German doctrine when we wrote, and it reflects genuine learning from what the war in Ukraine has revealed about the nature of modern large-scale conflict.
What Remains to be Demonstrated
It would be wrong to read the 2026 strategy as the completion of Germany’s defense transformation. It is better understood as the beginning of a serious implementation effort. The gap we identified in 2020 between recognition and commitment has narrowed substantially. Germany now has, for the first time, an integrated military strategy, a force planning document with real accountability structures, phased milestones, and explicit capability targets. The commitment to at least 460,000 military personnel by 2035 provides a concrete benchmark against which implementation can be measured.
The document itself acknowledges that the full versions of the Military Strategy and the Capability Profile remain classified, and that the detailed phase organization for the Army, Air Force, Navy, Support, and Special Operations Forces cannot be made public for security reasons. The ambition is clear; the implementation details remain to be tested. The German defense industrial base, procurement timelines, and the political durability of spending commitments across budget cycles will all determine whether the phased buildup actually materializes on the described timeline.
The cultural challenge has not been resolved simply because the strategic documents now reflect a more realistic assessment. German society’s willingness to sustain the resource commitments required over the decade ahead, through political transitions and economic pressures, remains to be demonstrated. Dr. Dennison’s core question, how to create a willingness among Germans to sacrifice for the broader German or European good, does not answer itself through the publication of a military strategy, however well-constructed.
Conclusion: The Journey from Challenge to Strategy
When we published our book in 2020, we were describing a country whose expert and military communities understood the strategic situation far better than its political leadership did, and that faced a persistent gap between the conceptual work that had been done and the real commitments that had not yet been made. The chapter entitled, “Germany as the Lynchpin State” underscored that Germany’s transformation was both essential and irreplaceable. No other European state had the economic weight, the geographic centrality, or the potential force mass to fill the role that Germany needed to fill. But the gap between potential and performance was striking.
The April 2026 documents represent the most serious attempt in the history of the Federal Republic to close that gap. The threat assessment is clear-eyed, the strategic role is accepted rather than deflected, the force structure targets are concrete, and the capability priorities, from deep precision strike to territorial missile defense to information superiority to Germany as operational base, directly address the requirements we identified in 2020. The framing of multi-domain operations, the acknowledgment of the transparent battlefield, the explicit treatment of hybrid warfare as an ongoing rather than a prospective threat: all of these reflect a strategic maturity that was unevenly distributed across German institutions when we were writing.
The question we posed in 2020, how will Germany translate strategic understanding into actual defense commitment, now has an institutional answer in the form of these documents. Whether it will have a practical answer in the form of a rebuilt Bundeswehr by the end of the decade remains the central test. What can be said with confidence is that Germany now has, for the first time, a genuine strategic compass. The journey from challenge to strategy has been completed. The journey from strategy to capability is just beginning.