With Friedrich Merz starting his stint as Germany's chancellor, he has pressure from both East and West — from a resurgent Russia on the continent's borders and from a Trump administration urging allies to increase military spending. Against this background, Merz visited Vilnius, Lithuania, last week to monitor the activation of a permanent German tank brigade — the nation's first armoured unit stationed outside the country since World War II. The move was a watershed moment in Germany's military position, reasserting its allegiance to NATO while attempting to hedge against a possible Russian invasion via Belarus, the New York Times reported.
Merz vows Europe's strongest conventional army
At the public ceremony, Merz vowed to expand the German military into the strongest conventional European power. In making this pledge, he echoed his previous inaugural address to legislators in Berlin and marks a dramatic military transformation driven by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Merz is capitalizing on a constitutional reform approved by his predecessor Olaf Scholz that untied military expenditure from Germany's hard caps on government borrowing. The consequence: Germany is now setting the stage to quintuple its defence budget, spending lavishly on hardware, readiness, and deployments overseas.
Massive defence spending and constitutional change
The drive to modernise is spearheaded by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, the unusual minister to be re-elected across governments. Supported by constitutional reforms, the Merz government will spend as much as 3.5% of Germany's GDP on defence and another 1.5% on key infrastructure — significantly more than NATO's long-standing 2% threshold. The move mirrors not just Germany's reaction to Russian aggression but also Trump's pressure campaign for European countries to take on a greater defence burden.
Challenges: barracks, staffing, and bureaucracy
Even as Germany's defence spending soared, its military forces — the Bundeswehr — are plagued by inherent problems. A parliamentary report last month showed substandard barracks, scarce training centres, and mass personnel misassignment, with physicians and helicopter pilots stuck in office work. Shortages of basic equipment still abound as weapons are shifted to Ukraine and ammunition supplies are thin. Recruitment is up, but Germany's army still has 20,000 unfilled positions, and controversies rage about the reintroduction of some kind of national service.
A strategic Lithuania force by 2027
Lithuania's new 45th armoured brigade is to be fully operational — 4,800 soldiers — by 2027. Pistorius took the project close to heart, traveling to Lithuania regularly and assisting in the establishment of family services such as schools and daycares in an effort to encourage volunteers. For Lithuanians such as Edmund Kulikauskas, a US citizen who came back home after years overseas, the German troops' presence is comforting. "These are a different kind of Germans," he said, applauding the presence as a deterrent against Russian expansion.
Merz's swift military turn is a historic shift for a nation previously hesitant to project power overseas. The approach not only redefines Germany's place in NATO but also primes the ground for a wider European response to Russian aggression. With tensions brewing and defence ministers around the continent arguing about troop preparedness and budgets, the new posture of Germany could reshape the continent's security architecture — and that of the nation itself.
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