To the sound of a throbbing techno beat, Joshua Krebs, wearing full army fatigues, shades and ear defenders, cavorts on top of a tank. He gives the thumbs up as shots flash from the barrel in time to the music.
Krebs is a tank commander in the Bundeswehr. But he is also an important weapon in the German army’s latest battle: to encourage men — and, increasingly, women — to sign up to combat the growing threat from the east. He is effectively a state-sponsored influencer, who pumps out videos under the moniker “the cinematic sergeant” to convince young Germans that being in the army is, in fact, cool.
At a summit in the Hague last week Germany, along with Britain and its Nato allies, agreed to raise defence and related expenditure to 5 per cent of their gross domestic product by 2035. For all the celebration of a commitment to defence, the hundreds of billions of pounds pledged does not account for one huge question: where will Nato countries find sufficient young recruits to fire all the guns, drive the tanks and fly the drones the new money will buy?
‘Krebs — and others like him with thousands of followers on social media — are part of Germany’s answer. While some clips are of tanks rolling through cornfields, he also offers more mundane clips inside barracks and other glimpses of the reality of service life.
In one, from early this year, he conducts a brief interview with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, who raised eyebrows in the Hague last week by describing Donald Trump as Europe’s “daddy”.
“Do you think that Germany is able — actually able — to be a military leading nation in Europe?” Krebs asks the former Dutch prime minister in German-accented English.
“You are a leader, absolutely, and … a rich country. You have to defend yourself and therefore defend all of us,” Rutte shoots back, adding: “Thank you so much for your service,” as he shakes him by the hand. Krebs has even written a book, Inside the Bundeswehr: What Makes the Troops Special and Why We Must Strengthen Them, due out in October.
Germany’s military importance, as the European Union’s richest and most populous member, is obvious. Yet, initially reined in by the victorious Second World War allies and long haunted by its Nazi past, Germany spent decades punching below its weight. Even after reunification in 1990 it still preferred to rely on America to defend it and today pacifism runs strong, not just on the far left but also, ironically, on the far right.
Shortly after becoming chancellor in May, Friedrich Merz vowed to build the strongest conventional army in Europe, overtaking France.
Weeks before he spoke, he had forced through a controversial change in the country’s tight budgetary rules to fund this. The amount spent on defence is set to surge from €86 billion (2.4 per cent of GDP) this year to €153 billion (3.5 per cent) by 2029, it was announced last week.
Yet that means recruiting more troops. Boris Pistorius, the Social Democratic Party defence minister, has warned that Germany, which has about 180,000 men (and women) troops, will need to find an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 more.
For many conservatives — including Merz himself — the solution is a return to conscription, which was suspended in 2011. Pistorius’s Social Democrats are wary, however, especially while there aren’t the barracks to house the troops.
Meanwhile, Pistorius has proposed a form of voluntary conscription, in which every 18-year-old is sent a questionnaire — and which men would be required by law to complete. Some would then be called for a medical exam and a proportion of those who pass encouraged to apply to serve.
According to Aylin Matlé, a security expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, Germany, like many of its European allies, will ultimately struggle to muster all the soldiers needed to fulfil Nato’s defence plans without coming up with some element of a mandatory conscription service. “A goal to get numbers up to 203,000 has already been postponed a couple of times, and the target year is now 2031,” Matlé said.
The war between the generations
Any move towards compulsion risks pitting generation against generation, according to a poll last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Germans aged over 30 are increasingly in favour of compulsory service, the older they are. Those in their twenties — the ones who would actually be called up — are firmly opposed.
Emilio Bax, 24, studying engineering in the southwestern city of Ulm, is not surprised. Although he knows people who have enlisted, he thinks most of his friends would not be happy to be obliged to serve. “For me, I don’t know if I would really like to go and get a gun and start fighting,” he said.
Nor is such reluctance confined to Germany. In Britain and all but one of the other seven countries polled, a majority of 18 to 29-year-olds are opposed, in most cases strongly.
The exception is France, where all age groups are in favour of bringing back the draft, which was finally abolished in 2001. “The French army has a good image,” said Michel Yakovleff, a retired general, who was conscripted in 1976, “[Germany’s army] lost its war-fighting ethos about 20 years ago.”
Nine other Nato countries — largely on its northeast flank — have either had conscription for decades or brought it back in response to the rise in tensions with Russia.
As elsewhere in Nato, much of the extra spending in France will go not on manpower but on much-needed equipment. Nevertheless, there are problems, Yakovleff says, especially with the organisation of the military reserve. The government is trying to double its numbers from the current 50,000.
The Swedish model
Like many other European defence experts, Yakovleff is looking to Sweden, where a unique conscription system has in recent years turned military service into an aspiration for many young people — rather than something to dodge.
Under the rules, the entire cohort of 18-year-old Swedish citizens — 110,000 this year — receive an enlistment form they are obliged to fill in. Of these about 28,000 are called in for interview and just 9,000 selected. This includes women as well as men — among them Crown Princess Victoria, whose gun-toting military exploits are followed by the Swedish media.
“I want to do it first of all because it’s good for you to go out and meet new people and have new experiences,” said Leo, who turned 18 last December and is in his final year at school in Stockholm.
His enthusiasm to serve has also been fuelled by a skilful government information campaign centred both around new military kit and the potential threat from Russia. “It gets you fired up and makes you think you want to be part of that and to protect freedom. It’s a tough world.”
This spring, Leo, who declined to give his surname, was pleased to be called in for two days of rigorous physical and psychological tests, but narrowly failed. Among those from his group who succeeded was a girl who will now learn to drive a tank.
Because he was born so late in the year, he will get another chance in 2026. His hope is to join the elite Army Ranger Battalion, based in the far north.
Jens Wenzel, a Danish defence analyst who has lived in Sweden for many years, traces the beginnings of the change of mood in the country to 2014, when Vladimir Putin grabbed his first chunk of Ukraine. Sweden, which was not yet a member of Nato, began to fear for its own security and set out to strengthen its defences.
For Wenzel, who is also a commander in the Danish navy, there is something unique about Swedish culture that makes him wonder if the same approach would work in his own homeland, let alone elsewhere in Europe. “The obligation to serve society is very strong in Sweden,” he said. “From the age of 16 to 70 you have different graduations of responsibility in terms of what you can be called on to do. It’s called your civilian duty.”
Neighbouring Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with its old foe, Russia, also depends on conscription — though only of men: about 70 per cent of each cohort serve each year, plus a far smaller number of women who volunteer. The system is key to the country’s ability to muster a force of 24,000 active troops, that grows to 300,000 in wartime — a huge number for a country of 5.6 million.
This is unlikely to change, according to Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “Conscription is seen as a very normal part of a Finnish man’s life,” he said. “Your father has likely done it and so has your grandfather. It’s not always enjoyable, but it’s more or less your patriotic duty.”
