FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Reading Germany’s Rearmament: The 2026 Military Strategy Between Ambition and Accountability Julian Pawlak
On April 22, 2026, Germany published what has been called the first military strategy in the Bundeswehr’s history. Signed by Chief of Defence Gen. Carsten Breuer, it is part of the broader “overall concept of military defence” (Gesamtkonzeption militärische Verteidigung) underlined as “Military Strategy and Plan for the Armed Forces” with the notable addendum “Responsibility for Europe.”1 The Military Strategy describes Germany’s strategic environment, specifies how the Bundeswehr intends to deter within NATO and, if deterrence fails, to fight, and how to achieve this capability in the upcoming years. The so-called capability profile builds on this approach, folding NATO’s capability targets together with national objectives and turning the result into what a genuine plan for the armed forces. This core is completed by a personnel growth plan, a revised reserve strategy, and a modernization agenda. It highlights a German leadership ambition that now hinges on the accountability of those claims.
Evolution Not Revolution Some observers claim that Germany’s military strategy marks a genuine shift in a country that spent 70 years avoiding exactly this kind of document as the infamous “reluctant hegemon”2 of Europe, due to its economic power, size, and, hence, potential of military development. Yet, one could argue that the strategy is not a clear cut of former strategic orientation, but the latest and steepest development in a line of documents that runs back nearly a decade. The 2016 White Paper, following the beginning of Russia’s war efforts against Ukraine in 2014, already registered a hardening security environment and a more assertive Russia.3 Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende
address of February 2022, quickly developing into a frequently used term even beyond Germany, became symbol of Germany’s strategic adaptation to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.4 The 2023 National Security Strategy,5 also a German primer, framed security as a whole-of-government task. The defense policy guidelines (Verteidigungspolitische Richtlinien) of the same year underlined national and collective defense as the Bundeswehr’s core mission and promised to translate that into a military strategy and a new capability profile. The given concept of military defense and its related documents further engage in exactly that promise. Each step in this sequence has moved further than the last, whilst the given 2026 strategy publicly creates the architecture and timeline to achieve. Hence, readers should treat the claimed novelty with some care. As has been underlined, Germany has always had functional equivalents of national security documents, notably its White Papers.6 They represented the government’s overarching policy document on defense policy and have been published 11 times from 1969 until 2016.7 Therefore, the change lies in the explicit architecture that now runs from strategy to a needs-based capability plan, not in the sudden invention of strategy where none existed. In broader terms, a strategy is often called to follow the triad of ends, ways, and means. In its details, the strategy continues German and allied documents by naming Russia as the most immediate and significant threat and explains a hybrid, multi-domain conflict directed against the German state, the economy, and society at large. Four military-strategic priorities, the ends, are named to achieve and deal with the given and upcoming threat landscape: deterrence and collective defense, mitigation of hybrid attacks,