Boosted and puffed up, our federal government is bursting with war fever.
Even if the US government is currently dampening the war fever a bit, at least as far as Russia is concerned, the Germanic march eastward is supposed to resume the momentum it has so sorely lacked for over 80 years. Our beloved “Defense” Minister Boris Pistorius, the only minister who politically survived the change from Scholz the Bald to Merz the Tall, already declared in 2024, with manly resolve, to the astonished public of the Bundestag: “We must be ready for war by 2029!”[1] Three times hooray!
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After two years, we’ve become quite accustomed to the “war-ready” serum. But nobody asks how Boris Pistorius actually arrived at the target year of 2029? Was it just a rough estimate? Or did the advisors of the valiant Lower Saxon use a formula secret from us to determine the exact year of the big bang?
Anyway. So, starting in 2029, we’re supposed to go to war against the evil Russians. The evil Russians, as the war in Ukraine has shown us all too clearly, are remarkably resilient and willing to suffer. So far, the evil Putin has hardly had to force any young men into military service in Ukraine. Young men are even volunteering for military service there. Will our young German men also rush to arms with enthusiasm when Boris calls them up in 2029? That’s doubtful. While a survey of people between 18 and 80 years old in 2025 showed that a whopping 58 percent welcomed the reintroduction of conscription, the degree of personal impact varied considerably[2]. While older people enthusiastically support conscription (”Well, it didn’t do me any harm!”), young people have no desire for murder and mayhem. Only 14 percent of youngsters can imagine becoming soldiers. Hardly any novice wants to have projectiles whizzing past their ears in the frost and mud of Ukraine.
The longed-for goal of being ready for war in just three years seems to astute observers like an episode from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Has Pistorius perhaps neglected crucial components of professional war preparation? I recall that preparations for the First and Second World Wars followed certain principles. First, the transportation infrastructure must be in top condition, in all directions. You never know how the enemy situation might change. Second, the human capital—as some cynical circles like to call it, meaning the actual people—must be in agreement with the government, or at least capable of cooperating with it. Furthermore, the people must be healthy and highly motivated. They must be educated and cooperative. They must know how to best work together as a group. Often, this consensus across opposing factions can only be achieved by inventing a common enemy. Meanwhile, the subjects are entertained by the cheerful performances of Heinz Rühmann and Hans Albers.
Besides social harmony, intact infrastructure, and a strong sense of community, it’s also crucial that finances are reasonably sound. Money must represent value. Back then, between the two world wars, money primarily served production and trade, not so much as a tool for gambling like today. In these waters of raising money, the Nazis would surely have failed with their hyper-armament program on their own. That is, if the transatlantic-connected Hjalmar Schacht hadn’t provided them with a parallel currency—the so-called Mefo bills—that was both secret and unofficial. With his Mefo bills, Schacht stimulated the economy without ever having to trigger inflation.
And What Is Different in the Case of Boris P.?
Image: Pistorius in 2025 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
I don’t see any of the successes of past war preparations being applied in the present day.
What about manpower? Well, I once asked a Russian friend if the Russians weren’t afraid of the Germans. My friend laughed and replied,
“The Germans are vaccinated with mRNA. They’re weakened. How are they supposed to carry a weapon?”
Well, firstly, the Russians, based on bitter experience, are probably quite afraid of Germans carrying weapons. Secondly, it’s not just mRNA injections that are likely to erode military morale. What the Nazis called “Volksgesundheit” (i.e. maintaining public health) is hardly evident in present-day Germany. The big food corporations are allowed to pump unlimited amounts of refined sugar into the veins of Germans with impunity. Smoking is harmful to health, but it’s still heavily promoted and marketed. The state, as the tax collector, is the biggest accomplice in this game. The idea of becoming organically integrated with one’s mobile phone, even before reaching puberty, is generally accepted. The fact that this inevitably leads to massive cognitive damage isn’t a concern. After all, don’t care, the community foots the bill.
And? Where are the tanks of our glorious heroes supposed to rumble eastward? A staggering 130,000 bridges in Germany are beyond repair[3]. Many an Abrams tank could roll off a collapsing bridge before it even gets to the battlefield. Yes, and 84 percent of all German business owners complain about this rotten infrastructure, which severely restricts them and sometimes even poses an existential threat[4]. We won’t sing the Deutsche Bahn (German train) blues today. You already know the tune from your own passionate experience. Research and education: Excellence universities siphon off all the talent. The second-tier universities, fearing relegation: leaking lecture hall ceilings and third-party funding – groveling to Carossa, to one of the generous car companies.
And what about the poor children? What are we doing to them? From birth, they experience the world as a diabolical threat. The media bombards these youngsters with nothing but negative messages. Is it any wonder, then, that our children react self-destructively to this attack? One in six children is overweight or obese. As they age, this pattern continues to worsen, so that by the time adults are overweight or obese[5]. Around ten million Germans suffer from severe depression[6]. Their number has increased significantly over the years. And children pay a particularly high price to the prevailing negativity mainstream, as a scientific study has shown:
“The number of inpatient treatments for children/adolescents under 15 years of age increased tenfold from 2000 to 2017 (2000: 410, 2017: 5,790). In 2022, over 22,600 adolescents (10-17 years) were hospitalized.”[7]
This hurts. The COVID-19 campaign, in particular, has instilled massive fear in people, whether they admit it or not. A study among British dentists shows how people are clenching their teeth to cope with their massive fear:
“For example, the prevalence of teeth grinding and jaw clenching rose from 35% before the pandemic to 47%. Daytime teeth grinding increased from about 17% to 32%. Nighttime teeth grinding also rose from 10% to 36%.”[8]
And the market-driven dismantling of the public education sector has already produced a staggering six million functionally illiterate people[9]. And when times are tough, that is to say, when the finance minister’s or city treasurer’s string orchestra is wielding the saw again, swimming pools and sports fields rot away. No money for sports, games, or excitement. In over 60 percent of all German municipalities, there is no money left even for the maintenance and renovation of sports halls and swimming pools[10]. The remaining physical education classes are increasingly being taught by untrained individuals. No wonder that as early as 2010, half of all young men who were drafted were sent home as unfit for military service.
To return once more to the factor of community spirit as a prerequisite for successful war preparation: there has never been so much division and incitement as in the last 15 years. Young against old. Rich against poor. Corona believers against Corona skeptics. Vaccination advocates and anti-vaxxers. Working people against welfare recipients. A tabloid newspaper invents new objects of hatred every day.
So, in short, and rather unappetizing terms: Germany does not meet the requirements to be “war-ready” in 2029. It is further removed from large-scale collective efforts than ever before in its history.
Up to this point, we’ve had an unspoken assumption: that the next war will be conceived and fought by humans. Can we still feel so confident in this assumption?
The Kneeling before the Minister of War
The US is already a step ahead. Not only is the former Secretary of Defense now honestly called “Secretary of War” again, as was the case in the past, but this is also a frank and emphatic statement that the sole purpose of the armed forces should be their deployment in war.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a dashing fellow. He has biblical motifs tattooed on his sometimes bare chest, including “God wills it!” (Deus lo vult!), a reference to the slogan coined by Pope Urban II for the crusade to the East in the year 1095. It’s clear that Hegseth is eager to see some action. While politically unfit figures like Senator Lindsey Graham salivate and cheer on Pete Hegseth to ever more acts of war, the military is considerably more cautious. After all, it’s the military’s risk if a military operation goes wrong.
That same dashing Secretary of War, Hegseth, now has an ambitious plan to increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to conduct the next ninety-three wars of aggression against innocent victim nations. Since the ignominious end of the Vietnam War, the US has refrained from risking excessively high lethal losses of soldiers in its own camp. Wars have since been fought only against hopelessly outmatched opponents, increasingly to tackle fires they themselves started. Thus, American military adventures have since been decided with relatively few losses for their own side.
But if you want to defeat equally matched opponents, you have to replace your manpower with autonomous combatants. In other words: intelligent cruise missiles that independently select their target. But in the long term, it also means replacing more and more soldiers with robots. These robots can then also be used against your own revolting population.
And so, Hegseth has been cooperating with leading AI providers such as OpenAI, Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok for some time now. His favorite, however, was Anthropic, the company founded by OpenAI dissidents. Anthropic’s system, named Claude, won the favor of the zealous Defense Minister Hegseth. The system played a crucial role in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. This operation, in which Anthropic cooperated with the global surveillance company Palantir, was already borderline acceptable to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropic developed a red line outlining what is absolutely unacceptable in AI applications. Accordingly, Anthropic’s AI must not be used for population surveillance. Furthermore, it must not be used for autonomously operating weapons systems and robots. According to this guideline, humans must always retain the final decision-making authority.
This doesn’t suit Hegseth at all. In both sectors, mass surveillance and robotic combatants, the Minister of War wants to do everything that is technically possible. Ethically and morally motivated self-restraint is not Hegseth’s style. Hegseth and his people would prefer to make modern AI warfare possible with Anthropic AI. A staff member at the Ministry of War told the media outlet Axios regarding Anthropic:
„The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good.” <11>
A delicate love-hate relationship. One could also say: “If you don’t want to be my brother, I’ll smash your skull in.” If Anthropic refuses Hegseth’s advances, the jilted suitor has already threatened to make Anthropic’s life difficult with all sorts of obstacles. Other AI companies are already lining up to replace Anthropic in Pete Hegseth’s war games.
It’s a chilling thought: to be at the mercy of a completely soulless fighting robot, as a flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. But the arms race in artificial intelligence will practically force such tendencies. Any middle power that graciously forgoes the rapid progress in the military application of artificial intelligence will, as Canadian Prime Minister Carney so aptly put it recently, end up “on the menu of the great powers.”
So let’s return to our initial question: why does our current Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius, believe that this misused Germany, with its Germans who are both unfit for and unwilling to fight, could somehow be “war-ready” in just three years? Does he believe that if “human capital” remains unfit for war, then the longed-for war against Russia can still be waged with robot soldiers?
We’ve seen that neither option works. Germany is neither fit for war without drastic course corrections, nor will we have any AI robots at our disposal in three years. So, what we’re dealing with here is simply a gigantic miscalculation by the federal government. Germany is blithely hurtling towards the wall. And just as blithely, it’s heading for its third defeat in a war. Or even if we should somehow manage to stop this train to nowhere, the economic damage caused by this war madness will still be enormous.
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Hermann Ploppa is a political scientist and journalist. Ploppa recently published the book “Der Neue Feudalismus – Privatisierung, Blackrock, Plattformkapitalismus” (The New Feudalism – Privatization, Blackrock, Platform Capitalism). As Amazon does not yet stock the book, it is best to order it from the author at: [email protected]. Visit the author’s blog here.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
[7] siehe <6>
Featured image is from the author
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