100,000 million and 2% are no longer enough: Germany wants to spend 3% on defense and recover the military.
The new strategy that emerged from Germany’s marked shift in its defence policy in February 2022, following the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has given a new acceleration two years and three months later. The country’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, has gone far beyond the €100 billion of additional spending that was then pledged and the arrival of 2% of the country’s GDP in military spending by requesting that that quota be raised to 3% and the recovery of compulsory military service.
Once the 2% target has been met (reached this year according to the budgets approved last summer, in which the Defense portfolio is the only one in which the federal government scheduled a promotion, while all the others have experienced cuts) the goal is now more ambitious. “We need more money, there’s no doubt about that, and I think we’ll get to 3 percent or even more,” Pistorius said last week during a speech at the German-American Institute in which he also expressed his conviction that his country “needs some kind of compulsory military service.” Pistorius believes that the suspension of conscription at the end of the Cold War was a “mistake.”
At the moment these are just words, no concrete plan to achieve these ambitious goals has yet emerged. The timing, moreover, is not easy, with the budget deficit of 25,000 million dollars estimated for 2025, which complicates Pistorius’ request for 6,500 million to meet the purchase of new military equipment, reports Breaking Defense.