Olaf Scholz's Zeitenwende speech of 27 February 2022 was greeted, in some quarters, with a degree of strategic scepticism that experience had earned. Germany had, over the previous three decades, managed to acknowledge virtually every major security challenge in Europe without meaningfully adjusting its defence posture. The history of German defence spending from the end of the Cold War to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is largely a history of promises made and budgets delayed.
The current cycle is different. Germany's defence budget reached €73.4 billion in 2024, representing 2.08% of GDP — the first time Germany had hit the NATO 2% target in the alliance's modern era. The €100 billion Sondervermögen has been largely committed to specific programmes, removing the most obvious mechanism by which ambitious defence announcements typically disappear into bureaucratic process.
Rheinmetall's order book tells the story more succinctly than any policy document. It has tripled since 2021 — from approximately €15 billion to over €50 billion across its defence segment. The KF51 Panther tank programme, the IRIS-T air defence system expansion, and the commitment to F-35 procurement are all moving.
"For a country that spent decades making peace with its military past, Germany is now writing cheques that its grandfathers would have found astonishing."
The real bottlenecks are not financial but industrial and human. Skilled labour in the German defence sector is genuinely scarce. The Bundeswehr itself has been recruiting hard and still falls short of authorised strength in several specialties. This constraint adds 18 to 24 months to virtually every contract timeline, and it is not something that political will can resolve quickly.
What makes the German case genuinely interesting is that the industrial transformation is happening simultaneously with a cultural one. Germany is actively renegotiating its relationship with military power in ways that carry significant social weight. The debates about conscription revival, about German troops on the eastern flank, about arms exports to conflict zones, are central to whether the Zeitenwende becomes durable policy.
Germany's reindustrialisation of its defence sector is the single most significant development in European security since the Cold War ended — not because of what Germany is buying, but because of what a militarily serious Germany means for the entire European defence industrial and political structure. The capability will follow. It is taking longer than the speeches suggested, but it is coming.