A dozen senior German officers convened at a triangle-shaped military compound in Berlin about 2½ years ago to work on a secret plan for a war with Russia.
Now they’re racing to implement it.
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The blueprint details how as many as 800,000 German, U.S. and other NATO troops would be ferried eastward toward the front line. It maps the ports, rivers, railways and roads they would travel, and how they would be supplied and protected on the way.
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At a higher level, the plan is the clearest manifestation to date of what its authors call an “all-of-society” approach to war. This blurring of the line between the civilian and military realms marks a return to a Cold-War mindset, but updated to account for new threats and hurdles—from Germany’s decrepit infrastructure to inadequate legislation and a smaller military—that didn’t exist at the time.
German officials have said they expect Russia will be ready and willing to attack NATO in 2029. But a string of spying incidents, sabotage attacks and airspace intrusion in Europe, many of them attributed to Moscow by Western intelligence, suggest it could be preparing to pounce sooner.
Analysts also think that a possible armistice in Ukraine ... could free up time and resources for Russia to prepare a move against NATO members in Europe.
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The yearslong effort to make Germany war-ready again began days after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz unveiled a €100 billion rearmament fund, hailing the decision a zeitenwende, or an “epochal change.”
Later that year, the German military, known as the bundeswehr, created a Territorial Command to lead all homeland operations and tasked its commander, Lieutenant General André Bodemann, a veteran of Kosovo and Afghanistan, with drafting OPLAN [Operation Plan].
In a war with Russia, Germany would no longer be a front line state but a staging ground. On top of a degraded infrastructure, it would have to contend with a shrunken military and new threats such as drones.
“Refugees and reinforcements would be pouring in from opposite directions. The flows would need channeling, which the bundeswehr alone can’t do, especially while it’s fighting,” said Claudia Major, head of trans-Atlantic security initiatives at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
This means the military would need to join with the private sector and civilian organizations on a scale it hadn’t done before.
By March of last year, drawing on feedback from an expanding circle of ministries, government agencies and local authorities, Bodemann’s team had completed the plan‘s first iteration.
The time had come to put it in action.
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While the new Merz government was trumpeting a €500 billion defense spending plan and a return to conscription this year, the bundeswehr was working under the radar, briefing hospitals, the police and disaster relief agencies, striking agreements with states and the autobahn operator and drawing transit routes for military convoys.
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The inadequacies of peacetime legislation have also made it harder for Germany to protect itself against sabotage—one of the biggest threats facing OPLAN [
Such sabotage is already happening. Scores of attacks, from arson to vandalized cables, have targeted the railway system in recent years. In October, a Munich court jailed a man for planning to sabotage military installations and railway infrastructure on behalf of Russia.
This week, Poland said Russia was behind an explosion that damaged railway tracks in the country’s east. Germany’s domestic intelligence agencies said it conducted almost 10,000 employee background checks for critical infrastructure operators last year alone.
“If Germany is going to be NATO’s hub, then as the enemy, I’d want to target that: block the ports, take down the power, disrupt the railways,” said Paul Strobel, head of public affairs for Quantum Systems, a Peter Thiel-backed maker of surveillance drones that is in talks with the bundeswehr about providing convoy and infrastructure protection for OPLAN.
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Yet as the recent stress tests showed, there is still work to do for the plan and reality to line up. The biggest uncertainty facing the planners is how much time they have.
Given the steep rise in sabotage, cyberattacks and airspace intrusions, the difference between peace and war is looking increasingly fuzzy.
“The threats are real,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz told business leaders in September. “We’re not at war, but we no longer live in peacetime.”
