Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy, took to Twitter in April to celebrate the EU stepping up to the plate, declaring that “NATO must no longer be a paper tiger”. He said: “Germany is now taking the leading role in this. After years of disarmament, Berlin is stepping up. The Department of War is already working closely with European allies, especially Germany, to accelerate this transition to NATO 3.0.” He then went on to quote from Berlin’s new Military Strategy: “Germany is taking on a historically unprecedented amount of responsibility for Europe, and will continue to build on this basis. NATO must become more European to remain transatlantic.”
The Berlin Strategy is a blueprint that builds on Colby’s 2026 US National Defense Strategy – a plan that sees the EU buy historic amounts of US military hardware in order to help the US counter the rise of China. Germany is fully on board and is leading the charge in militarising the EU.
On July 1st, Germany effectively ended voluntary participation in the military reserves and extended eligibility from six years after graduation to 65 years of age. All German men of 18 years are now obliged to complete a form indicating their readiness to serve and undergo a medical examination. While conscription proper has not been introduced yet, they are certainly heading in this direction.
One silver lining, though, is that the uptake is very low. The German military sent nearly 300,000 letters to 18-year-olds and only 530 signed up – that’s just 0.18%. Some 5,862 conscientious objector applications were received in the first half of 2026 – 50% more than in the whole of 2025.
In terms of military spending, the German federal military budget has moved from €35.9 billion in 2015 to €125 billion this year, rising each year to just short of €200 billion in 2030. By the end of the decade, Germany will be spending over 30 percent of its federal budget on war preparation. As the German Finance Minister said in Berlin in early June, “We cannot defend ourselves against Putin with a balanced budget.”
German society is being militarised. The so-called Operations Plan Germany (OPLAN) integrates civilian actors and public structures into the German Armed Forces’ war preparations. They are converting hospital car parks into military field hospitals, conducting surveys at nursing colleges that are basically recruitment drives to get nurses into the armed forces, and emergency rooms across Germany are being visited by the armed forces to assess their suitability for wartime functionality. A framework plan for Berlin hospitals has been leaked which is explicit about prioritising care of military personnel over ordinary Germans whenever the two are competing for attention.[1]
In July last year, in Bavaria, a law was passed that places an obligation on education institutions to cooperate with the German military “in the interest of national security”. Universities’ resources and research capacities must be made available to the German army “in the event of necessary military defence”.
This July, there was news of the Rheinmetall arms company expanding into third-level education; they are proposing, among other things, to fund a permanent professorship in one of the colleges of applied sciences.
The German economy is being reorientated towards military production. The industrial decline that spiralled after the Nord Stream bombing is now being turned into a desperate attempt at an arms boom. The German auto sector, once the powerhouse of the EU economy, saw its profits roughly halved for 2025. Volkswagen has announced plans to cut 50,000 jobs in Germany over the next three years. These companies are turning to the arms sector, where the EU has been working hard to improve capital-market access for all things military.
Volkswagen is in talks with Israeli companies with the aim of starting to produce components for Israel’s Iron Dome system by 2027. Companies are adding extra shifts to churn out weapons and ammunition for Ukraine. American Patriot interceptors are soon to be manufactured in Germany to meet demand.
German districts, like much of the EU in general, are facing multiple budgetary crises, and they are being told to improvise with less. This means diminished public transport services, dilapidated schools, and closed public amenities like swimming pools. This is the reality of NATO 3.0 – war preparation as a massive transfer of public wealth to private war profiteers.
And while this “defence” industry revolution is being spun as a massive buy-European initiative, the reality is that the US is the one that is – and will continue to – profit on EU funds, both public and private. The head of the German air force recently told Politico that the EU had to buy US-made weapons immediately because the urgency of the Putin threat means we cannot wait around for the development of European weapons systems.
Responding to this article, Elbridge Colby said: “The United States, as the President says, makes the best equipment, and we make it at a scale that no plausible competitor can match. If anything, access to the American defence industrial base is a privilege, not a right.”
US elites and the State Department pose an extraordinary threat to the people of Europe. First they precipitated the Ukraine conflict, bringing war to our borders and a cost-of-living crisis due to the backfire of sanctions against Russia. The US organised the bombing of Nord Stream, exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis and conveniently forcing Europe to buy American fracked gas at four times the price. They are meddling in the internal politics of multiple European countries in order to promote far-right and fascist forces. They are scooping up undervalued European companies at an increasing rate, due to a weak euro and a generational handover for which European business-owners are ill-prepared. They are profiting massively from the arms expenditure bonanza they strong-armed us into. They are mining the EU for companies – the likes of Blackstone Real Estate are mining us for rent – while US tech giants are mining us as a data-centre sacrifice zone.
The EU is taking on public debt to pay the US for weapons we do not need, to fight a direct war with Russia that our genocidal elites are sleepwalking us into at the behest of the US and some uniquely deluded European elites who think all this is going to make Europe great again.
Germany is spearheading this direction of travel, but they are responding to and working in concert with Brussels and Washington. When finalised, the proposed EU 2028–34 budget is expected to see a fivefold increase in EU budget funding for investment in the military sector. Dedicated climate, health, and conflict-prevention and peacebuilding spending are all being cut to zero. The common agricultural programme is being cut alongside social spending on poverty reduction, social inclusion, employment support, skills training and education.
The Irish government, for its part, is doing everything in its power to anti-democratically bring the country into the fold of the genocidal and white supremacist NATO/EU military axis.
We need to educate and organise against the EU, its militarisation and drive to war, its rapidly increasing repression of dissent and resistance, and its theft of our public wealth to enrich a shrinking group of capitalist elites who would happily watch the world and all the people in it burn in order to protect their profits.
[1] Volker Mörbe, ‘Die Militarisierung des Gesundheitswesens’, Informationsstelle Militarisierung IMI, 16 March 2026.
