Germany's armed forces: At ease

Conscription, a staple of Germany’s post-war identity, may be on the way out

SOMETIME between their 18th and 23rd birthdays nearly all German men will be summoned to one of 59 induction centres to be weighed, measured and evaluated. Nearly half will be deemed unfit to serve in the armed forces. Of the rest, the greatest part will opt out, choosing instead the non-military “community service”. In the end some 70,000 men a year are called up for a nine-month stint in the Bundeswehr. (Women are exempt from the draft.) Germany has held to conscription long after most European countries abolished it (most recently Sweden, on July 1st). The “citizen in uniform, anchored in society” is part of the country’s post-war identity.

It may soon be no longer. This month the German legislature passed a law shortening the tour of duty from nine months to six. That was the result of an awkward compromise between the partners in the ruling coalition. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU), consider conscription a “cornerstone” of society. The liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) thinks it a “massive intervention in young people’s freedom,” says Elke Hoff, an FDP deputy in the Bundestag. Cutting conscription back to six months may be a prelude to dispensing with it altogether. “There are so many disadvantages” to the truncated service “that you can’t keep it going long term,” says Hilmar Linnenkamp of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a think-tank in Berlin.

The main justification for the draft—the threat of invasion by a conventional army—disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is wobbling now because of two newer developments. The first is that money, always in short supply, is drying up. The government’s new €80 billion ($102 billion) savings package includes €8.3 billion of cuts to the defence budget over four years. The second is that the defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, an energetic sort with the air of a cavalry officer, relishes smashing taboos, or at least threatening to. Old problems are getting fresh looks.

The biggest is that the Bundeswehr is not set up for the tasks that await it. With just 6,700 of its 250,000 troops deployed abroad it is “at the limit” of its capacity, says Mr zu Guttenberg. The Bundeswehr does not aspire to be like the American or British armies, which have expeditionary traditions and can keep a much bigger share of their soldiers in the field. But to be a more useful ally, Germany will have to do better. The Bundeswehr still spends billions on weapons ordered during the cold war that are virtually useless against elusive insurgents like the Taliban.

Some changes have been made. The Bundeswehr is half the size it was at the end of the cold war and is the third-largest provider of troops to the NATO-led force in Afghanistan. But it has not changed enough. Mr zu Guttenberg wants it to be “more professional, faster and more flexible” and able to “deploy our soldiers anywhere in the world,” he told Der Spiegel.

Conscription is an obstacle to this. Draftees cannot be deployed abroad. They cost the Bundeswehr some €400m a year; training and organising them ties up an estimated 10,000-20,000 professional soldiers who could otherwise be employed more usefully. Mr zu Guttenberg, although a member of the conscription-loving CSU, wants to end the draft, but he has yet to persuade fellow conservatives or say what will replace it.

It will be traumatic if it happens. The draft is anchored in the constitution, which is why reformers talk of “suspending” rather than abolishing it. To its defenders, it is the best way to attract the sort of recruits the armed forces are looking for: not born warriors drawn to violence but thoughtful folk with varied talents who can win over local populations even as they hunt terrorists. Roughly half the soldiers on longer contracts come to the Bundeswehr via the draft; in general they are the better half, says Ulrich Kirsch, head of the BundeswehrVerband, a group that represents soldiers’ interests.


Follow the inner leader

Germans associate the draft with innere Führung, or “inner leadership”, the notion that a soldier should be guided by Germany’s constitutional principles rather than robotically follow orders, especially immoral ones. After unification, conscription helped to re-educate a generation of young East German men who had grown up thinking of democratic West Germany as the enemy.

But as the glue that binds soldiers to their fellow citizens conscription is losing its hold. It has already been shortened from 18 months in the 1960s to nine and now a vestigial six, half of which will be spent training. The downsizing of the armed forces has reduced the demand for conscripts. Refusal in favour of community service is easy. Now only about 15% of young men are called up. Once, the Bundeswehr was a topic of conversation at the family table and the local bar, says Berthold Meyer of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt. No longer.

Mr zu Guttenberg’s ideas for conscription will be part of a reform package he is expected to propose in September. It is likely to include a reduction in the overall size of the Bundeswehr, possibly to as few as 150,000 troops (the “extreme model”, says the minister), and cutbacks in weapons purchases. The armed forces are overloaded with civilian personnel and top-heavy with officers. Mr zu Guttenberg has created a “structural commission” to suggest solutions.

His radicalism may be curbed. Every base he would close and programme he would trim has a lobby to defend it. A decision to end conscription might require approval by the party conventions of the CDU and CSU. Even if his boldest ideas get through that will not be the final word. The European Union’s 27 armies have barely begun claiming the savings that would come from pooling resources and sharing tasks. Defence reform, the dashing Mr zu Guttenberg will discover, is a war of attrition, not a cavalry charge.