German Politicians, Military Chiefs Suggest Return of Conscription

By Staff, Agencies 

Political and military figures in Germany have suggested a return of compulsory military service after the new defense minister described the 2011 phase-out of general conscription as a “mistake” that had contributed to alienating the general public from civic institutions.

The German parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, Eva Högl of the centre-left SPD, on Wednesday urged the government to ask itself whether some form of obligatory civic service was required to address staff shortages in the German army’s ranks.

“We definitely need more personnel in the Bundeswehr,” Högl told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.

The chief of the German navy, Jan Christian Kaack, also recently proposed a return of mandatory military service along the Norwegian model, whereby men and women are called in for an examination upon turning 19, but only a small, motivated percentage of each year group is drafted into the army.

“I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in times like these will have a higher level of awareness if it is mixed through with soldiers,” said Kaack.

The government, for which the growing debate is above all a headache, has been quick to try to pour cold water over the debate. “All of our efforts have to be concentrated on strengthening the Bundeswehr as a highly professional army,” the finance minister, Christian Lindner, told Süddeutsche Zeitung, describing it as a “phantom dispute”.

The debate was kicked off by an interview in which Boris Pistorius, the new defense minister who took office last month, said it had been a mistake to phase out conscription more than a decade ago.

A return of obligatory military service would require the state to spend millions of euros to rebuild and upgrade barracks and buy in weapons and equipment for training, not least because the number of eligible conscripts would be higher than in the past: as in Norway, a modern version of military conscription would probably have to apply to women as well as men.

Since modern armies require staff trained in increasingly complex military hardware, conscripts serving for only a few months would be of little use.