Staffordshire, United Kingdom – General Carsten Breuer, current Inspector General of the German Bundeswehr (armed forces), has taken to attending regional town halls to warn German citizens of impending military threat from Russia.
General Breuer argues that Russia is preparing for war against NATO and could be ready to attack one of the NATO Baltic states as early as 2029.
This “enormous” buildup of Russia’s conventional military should frighten the West, the general believes. His affirmations certainly frighten some of the regional German audiences he speaks to.
At one such event, after asking attendees whether they were ready for war, one woman told Breuer that he was scaring her, to which he replied that the cause of her fear was sitting in Moscow.
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz seems to have heeded General Breuer’s warnings about the need for Germany and Europe to counter Russian aggression. Merz called for Germany to have the “strongest conventional army in Europe” in his first speech to the German Bundestag (parliament) after his election in May 2025.
The new chancellor’s speech seems to signal the new German administration’s increased prioritisation of military rearmament. In May, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul suggested that Germany could raise its defence spending to 5% of its GDP, in line with U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands of his NATO partners.
Image Source: Johann Wadephul via X
Although Wadephul’s comments represent the first time that the German government has mooted commitment to 5% of their spending on defence, German military rearmament has long been on the cards. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that the invasion marked a “turning point” in German national priorities.
Scholz’s administration then approved a €100 billion military modernization fund for the German military, originally designed to upgrade German military equipment and help the country play a more prominent role in the NATO alliance and EU military missions.
However, that boost in military spending increased its overall defence budget to approximately 2% of its GDP, which brought Germany in line with NATO’s defence spending commitments of 2014, when the organization’s leaders agreed that member states ought to pledge 2% of their economic outputs for defence.
However, although Scholz’s rearmament brought German spending up to par with NATO standards, it did not position the country for the kind of military prominence that the Merz government seems to covet.
Though any significant German rearmament breaks with tradition, as Germany has practised military restraint since the end of the Second World War, Merz’s military rearmament appears uniquely ambitious.
The Bundestag, in March, approved a change in the German constitution that would allow Merz’s government to spend €1 trillion of the German national debt on defence and infrastructure projects. Half of that figure is expected to go towards defence, as per Channel 4 News.
Furthermore, May 2025 marked the first time that a German unit was permanently deployed abroad since the end of the Second World War, when the 5,000-strong German 45 Armored Brigade was deployed to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to deter Russian aggression.
The deployment, according to Chancellor Merz, showed that Germany was “taking the defence of NATO’s eastern flank into [Germany’s] own hands.” The Central European nation also deployed fighter jets to Poland in early August to act as a deterrent ahead of Russian-Belarusian military exercises scheduled to take place in September.
Image Source: NATO Air Command via X
Merz has indicated that German military rearmament will continue unabated; in his first UK broadcast interview with BBC Europe, Merz said that Russian aggression represented a threat to peace, freedom, and “the political order of Europe”.
He also reiterated his commitment to ensuring that the US does not shoulder a disproportionate amount of NATO’s military spending: “We know we have to do more on our own and we have been free-riders [of the Americans] in the past […] they [the Americans] are asking us to do more and we are doing more.”
Featured Image: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte meet
Image Credit: NATO via Flickr
License: Creative Commons Licenses
