From World Politics Review: In addition to potential effects on Germany’s economic, energy, and foreign policies, the results of the Sept. 27 national elections raise questions about the future of Germany’s longstanding practice of military conscription. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) continues to support compulsory military service more than any other major German party, her preferred new coalition partner, the quasi-libertarian Free Democratic Party (FDP), opposes it.

Unlike most other NATO countries, Germany stubbornly adheres to the principle of compulsory military service. At present, all male German citizens are subject to nine months of conscription in the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces) when they reach the age of 18. As a result, the 250,000-member Bundeswehr has both long-term careerists — mostly officers, noncommissioned officers, and other professionals and volunteers — and approximately 60,000 short-term conscript soldiers…

German law exempts conscripts from mandatory deployments outside German territory, requiring conscripts who want to serve overseas to volunteer for an extension of their military service. This practice results in a large number of German soldiers assuming primarily administrative jobs in Germany, rather than combat or peacekeeping duties in foreign missions. Although Germany does have many professional soldiers, they are already heavily engaged in Kosovo, Sudan, and Afghanistan…

How the new German government resolves the conscription issue could have important implications for the future of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan as well as Germany’s relations with the United States and other allies. Abandoning the practice could make the German military more usable on foreign missions. But a failure to concurrently boost military spending would result in a much smaller aggregate number of German troops available for coalition operations outside the North Atlantic region, in the very areas that have increasingly become NATO’s strategic focus.

From the New York Times: The Free Democrats want to end conscription because they regard it as unjust, costly and inefficient. They want to transform the army into a smaller, professional and well-equipped corps.

“The issue of ending military conscription is out there,” said Karl-Heinz Kamp, director of research at the NATO College in Rome. (photo: Sean Gallup/Getty)