The Military Service Modernisation Act sets out plans to expand the number of active personnel from around 180,000 to 260,000 by 2035.<\/p>\n
In December, the German parliament voted to introduce voluntary military service, meaning that from January all 18-year-olds would be sent a questionnaire asking if they were interested in joining the armed forces.<\/p>\n
From July 2027, they must also undergo a fitness assessment to determine whether they would be eligible for service should war break out.<\/p>\n
Women may volunteer for military service but cannot be compelled to serve under Germany’s constitution.<\/p>\n
While the plan is for voluntary service, if the security situation worsens or if too few volunteers came forward, a form of compulsory military service could be considered.<\/p>\n
When the law was approved by parliament, many young people joined protests against the change.<\/p>\n
“We don’t want to spend half a year of our lives locked up in barracks, being trained in drill and obedience and learning to kill,” one organiser wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
Like other European countries, Germany ran down its armed forces during the peacetime years of the 1990s. During the Cold War it had an army of almost half a million.<\/p>\n
Compulsory military service in Germany was ended in 2011 under then-chancellor Angela Merkel.<\/p>\n
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged to rebuild the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional army in response to what his government describes as a more dangerous security environment in Europe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Military Service Modernisation Act sets out plans to expand the number of active personnel from around 180,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-513651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}