At a festival of democracy in Berlin last month, marking 75 years of the German constitution, the stand for the Bundeswehr, the country’s armed forces, was surrounded by a crowd five people deep.
But among the onlookers jostling to watch videos of recent operations and ogle its latest hardware, there were few of the people Germany’s military actually needs to appeal to: the young.
Germany is two years into its Zeitenwende, the “turning point” on defence proclaimed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022, as Russia began its all-out attack on its neighbour, Ukraine. Since then, it has boosted defence spending by billions.
But garnering far less attention than new kit and new ammunition is the problem of manpower.
With 181,000 active troops, the German military is at least 20,000 soldiers short of what its military chiefs say it needs to fulfil its current mandate. The deficit is one of the largest in Europe, but troop numbers from the International Institute for Strategic Studies show it is not the only one.
The UK has missed its annual military recruiting targets every year for the last decade, and last year its land forces lost 4,000 soldiers. The French armed forces, the largest in Europe with 203,850 men and women, are still short of what generals say are the numbers needed, and down 8 per cent since 2014. In Italy, the military’s size has dwindled from 200,000 a decade ago to 160,900 today.
On paper, European Nato allies have 1.9 million troops between them — seemingly enough to counter Russia (1.1m soldiers and 1.5m reservists). But in reality, European Nato powers would struggle to commit any more than 300,000 troops to a conflict — and even then, that would take months of preparation, analysts tell the FT.
“Nato defence planning in Europe for many years was about, ‘Are you ready to supply 300 special forces for Afghanistan,’ and nothing to do with mass. That’s created gaps,” says Camille Grand, distinguished fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and, until 2022, assistant secretary-general of Nato. With the exception of Greece and Turkey, “we have seen a shrinking in forces all over the continent year after year”.
In some senses numbers are a crude measure of military strength, as the earliest days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed. But even in technologically advanced militaries, mass is still critical if force structures are so lean that they have limited ability to absorb losses. And deterrence is also critical.
Recruiting more European soldiers to Nato’s flanks is thus even more essential at a time when US support cannot be guaranteed, Grand says.
“If there is a crisis, we need to be able to convince the Russian side that it is not just the Polish army standing in their way, but that the cavalry is coming, and it is credible.”
The problem of shrinking military manpower has been known about for some time.
In 2013, just three months before Russia first invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, Sir Nicholas Houghton, then chief of Britain’s defence staff, gave an unusually public warning about the problem the country faced as a result of troop shortages.
The structure of UK forces risked being “strategically incoherent,” he said, at a lecture at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute: “Exquisite equipment but insufficient resources to man that equipment or train on it.”
Since then, the UK military has shrunk by a further 19 per cent, to stand at around 138,000, according to the most recent Ministry of Defence figures. Yet the MoD today has a budget around 20 per cent larger in real terms, an increase regularly celebrated by politicians as a measure of commitment to national security.
According to Ben Barry, a former brigadier and senior fellow at IISS, it has been politically expedient to focus on bolstered budgets and impressive procurement programmes, but few national decision-makers have wanted to get to grips with the thornier challenge of signing more citizens up to fight.
“We’re at the tipping point of critical mass,” says Barry. “At this level you get into a vicious circle. If you’re undermanned, there’s less flexibility in what your people can do, you have less time to spare to send them on training and so on. And your people then becoming more and more frustrated. So they leave.”
For most of the post-Cold War period, smaller militaries made sense. France and Britain, the two most capable fighting powers in Europe, are still set up as “expeditionary” fighting forces whose capabilities are intended for short, targeted deployments in overseas theatres.
Both are now adapting to try to position themselves to counter the Russian threat, which has radically shaken up western nations’ notion of the kind of war they need to be ready for. But some fear they are still too hidebound by past experience and have accepted their diminished size as an unalterable reality.
While few advocate for any return to the Cold War days of troops ready for quick deployment in Germany, there is an open question about whether the present focus on providing Nato with elite command and support functions alone — leaving the mass to others — is enough.
“We have accommodated ourselves to this,” says one serving senior Nato officer who asked not to be named, “but what we need to be doing as militaries is [preparing for] the task we have to do, not the task we currently can do.” A franker debate around possible attrition rates is the starting point, he says.
The attrition rate was not so relevant when most operations were about stabilising faraway locations, says Christian Mölling, head of the centre for security and defence at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Now we are talking about being ready for combat situations where problems of a different quality come back: like, after several weeks of fighting, units in your professional army might be 50 per cent dead or wounded. We have unlearnt how to be ready for that.”
Beyond the headline numbers, diminished mass means critical “pinch point” skilled roles — such as those in medicine, communications, engineering and cyber security — are particularly vulnerable to losses. And it is these roles European militaries most urgently need to staff.
“Once you begin to unpack this problem of numbers, you find that after each door, there is another door with a problem behind it,” Mölling says.
In the fight to attract more skilled recruits, questions over pay and lifestyle are fundamental.
Alessandro Marrone, a military affairs expert at Rome’s Institute of International Affairs, says that in the past, an Italian military career was “quite competitive” with other options in the Italian job market, and the armed forces had no shortage of willing recruits.
Job competition
But today, young Italians have far more opportunities — a problem most obviously highlighted among graduates with the kind of high-tech skills required by modern warfare, who can easily find more lucrative jobs that offer the prospect of better work-life balances.
“The younger generation are used to travelling, studying abroad and looking for jobs not only in Italy,” Marrone says. “People with ICT or technology skills are able to find better jobs in the private sector...there is no easy solution.”
The UK’s Haythornthwaite review of 2023, which was commissioned to investigate how skilled army careers stacked up against those in the private sector, came to a similar conclusion.
“The armed forces’ competitors...are chasing the same, rapidly developing skills — and they often have more money to throw at the problem,” it warned last June, adding that the armed forces’ current “take it or leave it” approach had to change radically if the UK was to retain its military capabilities.
Sarah Atherton, a British army veteran and former junior minister for the armed forces, says the MoD is trying to change things. “The money is there. The issues have been raised, and criticism has been taken on the chin,” she says. “But I have no illusions. Nato countries are in the same situation as us, and perhaps even worse.”
If more Europeans do not choose military careers, their governments may seek other ways to sign them up to serve.
For weeks this spring, German defence minister Boris Pistorius trailed his big idea: to address its troop deficit, Germany would need to consider some form of conscription.
When the announcement finally came this month, after weeks of unexplained delays, it was seen by many as something of a damp squib.
Berlin proposes to send out a questionnaire to all 18-year-old German males — about 400,000 annually — quizzing them on their willingness to undertake a period of military service, and their skills. A smaller number will then be required to attend an assembly for potential selection — about 40,000 a year, the defence ministry hopes.
The Netherlands too has recently floated the idea of a hybrid conscription model: next year it hopes to sign up 2,000 for a “year of service” based on those it identifies as having potential from an existing mandatory questionnaire it sends out to the young when they turn 17.
Both the German and Dutch approaches take their cue from what defence planners have begun to reverently refer to as the “Scandinavian model” of conscription.
In Norway and Sweden, selective universal conscription models have proven highly successful.
Both are highly targeted measures. In Norway, only 14 per cent of those eligible end up serving, and in Sweden just 4 per cent. The very selectivity of the draft has added to its prestige: serving is a competitive outcome many skilled young Norwegians and Swedes aspire towards, national surveys show.
Experts say conscription — even successful hybrid models — will never be the whole solution, however, and instead, defence and military officials need to take a broader view of how to make a military career more appealing. One reason the model succeeds so well in Norway and Sweden is because a regular military career there is viewed as valuable and prestigious, says Grand, the former Nato official.
“There is a whole mix of factors that affect the attractiveness of serving in the military for a few years. And we could probably learn a lot of lessons from each other across Nato about what those are,” he adds. “The reality is that offering free driving lessons is no longer enough to attract people.”
First though, many European militaries will have to get the basics right. Across the continent one problem above all stands out: accommodation.
In her annual report on the state of the German military, parliamentary commissioner Eva Högl wrote this year that barracks across the country were in a state of dilapidation. On some bases, she noted, troops even have to pay for WiFi by the hour.
In Britain, the circumstances are similar. In April the Kerslake report found the quality of housing on UK bases to be so bad it was a “tax on the goodwill” of recruits. Persistent and “widespread” problems included “damp and mould... gas and electrical faults and pest infestations”.
In principle, rising military budgets across Europe bring the promise of better facilities. Historically, however, fresh money has tended to flow towards prestige equipment and platforms rather than to unglamorous refurbishments of military accommodation.
The state of housing reflects a broader cultural issue. Many still regard a military career as an “endurance” test. But there is a difference between growing through personal challenge and adventure, and toughing out personal and domestic hardship.
Elusive patriotism
One of the hardest factors to grasp, yet a potentially decisive one in the wake of Russia’s belligerence and with wider war a fearsome possibility, is the role of patriotism in building up militaries.
European societies relate to their armed forces in a broad range of ways; in Poland, where the government hopes to increase troop numbers to more than 300,000 by 2035, military officials say the long history of Russian aggression the country has experienced is a powerful motivator for recruitment.
“Compared with other countries, I think Poland is finding it easier to attract newcomers,” says Major General Karol Molenda, who heads the cybersecurity operations of Poland’s armed forces. “The majority of young Poles are aware of war, also from their discussions with their grandparents, and the fact that the war is now next to our border increases the number of young people who want to join the forces.”
At a technical high school in the southern city of Katowice, about 80 of the 300 students have taken up an offer to get two hours of military instruction a week, rather than spend that time learning about telecom wiring or solar panel installation. Last year, five students joined a military academy after graduating.
“I think some children feel very proud and attractive when they walk around in a uniform, but if you ask my personal opinion, being 15 seems too young to be made to think about going to war,” says Iwona Rawinis, who helps run the school.
There is still a lot of negative cultural baggage about the armed forces
The situation is similar in the Baltic States, where fears over Russian revanchism run similarly deep. These are nevertheless exceptions to the rule.
In neighbouring Germany, Pistorius has come under heavy criticism for repeatedly saying society needs to become “war ready”.
Despite the promises of the Zeitenwende, many Germans remain deeply committed to pacifism. Here, understandably, historical memory has the opposite effect.
But even in Britain, where public support for the military is consistently high, there is deep scepticism over topics such as national service. A proposal by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to reintroduce it has been met with widespread criticism.
“There is still a lot of negative cultural baggage about the armed forces — notions that were very strongly reinforced by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” says IISS’s Barry.
For Mölling at the German Council on Foreign Relations, the problem is solvable. “More and more people in Europe recognise the service of the armed forces,” he says. “We just have to work out how to make a career in the military work for people.”
“The difference between us and Putin is that for us it’s not just about headcount,” he says. “We are not just giving people a uniform and sending them to their death. We care about our soldiers. We have to communicate that better, but ultimately I think we have time on our side.”
Written by: Sam Jones in Berlin and John Paul Rathbone in London. Additional reporting by Raphael Minder in Warsaw and Amy Kazmin in Rome.
© Financial Times