Germany Dusts Off Preparations for War
BY BERTRAND BENOIT
The Wall Street Journal
Nov 28, 2025
Plans for potential conflict with Russia update old Cold-War mindset
BERLIN—A dozen senior German officers convened at a 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.
Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended decades of stability in Europe. Since then, the region has embarked on its fastest military buildup since the end of World War II. But the outcome of a future war won’t depend only on the number of troops and weapons in the field.
It will also hinge on the success of the monumental logistical operation at the heart of Operation Plan Germany, the 1,200 page-long classified document drafted behind the nondescript walls of the Julius Leber Barracks.
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.
“Look at the map,” said Tim Stuchtey, head of the nonpartisan Brandenburg Institute for Society and Security. With the Alps forming a natural barrier, North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops would have to cross Germany in case of a clash with Russia, he added, “regardless of where it might start.”
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, which the U.S. is pushing for this week, could free up time and resources for Russia to prepare a move against NATO members in Europe.
If they succeed in boosting Europe’s resilience, the planners think they cannot just ensure victory, but also make war less likely.
“The goal is to prevent war by making it clear to our enemies that if they attack us, they won’t be successful,” said a senior military officer and one of the earliest authors of the plan, known in military circles as OPLAN DEU.
The magnitude of the shift now required was on display this autumn, somewhere in the eastern German countryside.
There, the defense contractor Rheinmetall set up an overnight field camp for 500 soldiers, with dormitories, five gas stations, drone surveillance and armed guards screened for Russian and Chinese influence. It was built in 14 days and dismantled in seven.
“Picture building a small town from nothing and dismantling it in just a few days,” said Marc Lemmermann, head of sales at Rheinmetall’s logistics business.
Rheinmettall recently signed a €260 million deal to resupply German and NATO troops, part of the military’s efforts to incorporate more of the private sector into the plan.
The autumn operation exposed flaws too: The land couldn’t accommodate all the vehicles, said Lemmermann, and it consisted of noncontiguous plots, forcing Rheinmetall to bus soldiers to and fro. A previous dress rehearsal highlighted the need for a new traffic light at one location to alleviate gridlock.
Such lessons are continuously incorporated into OPLAN and its annexes. The document, housed on the military’s airgapped “red network,” is now in its second iteration.
Some of the biggest obstacles facing Germany’s military planners are intangible: ponderous procurement rules, data protection laws, and other regulations forged in a more peaceful era.
Executing the plan requires rewiring mentalities, erasing almost a generation’s worth of habits. “We must relearn what we unlearnt,” said Nils Schmid, deputy defense minister. “We have to drag people back from retirement to tell us how we did it back then.”
A troubling accident
A stretch of road on the A44 highway between the villages of Steinhausen and Brenken, in western Germany, offers a metaphor for how Europe lowered its guard in the past four decades of peace—and what it would take to raise it again.
Unlike elsewhere on the autobahn, the median strip on this 3.5-mile section isn’t grassy but solid tarmac. The rest areas are unusually large and oddly shaped. There are no overpasses or power cables in sight.
Dozens such sections were built during the Cold War for use as emergency landing strips. Kerosene tanks were buried underneath the parking areas. The guardrails could be unclicked and a mobile air traffic tower set up in minutes.
So-called dual-use infrastructure was the norm in Germany during the Cold War. Much like mandatory conscription meant civilian and military life were intimately connected, highways, bridges, train stations and ports were designed to serve as military assets if needed.
Then the Cold War ended. Tunnels and bridges built after that were often too narrow or flimsy to accommodate convoys. In 2009, Berlin dropped requirements for signs showing the military vehicles roads could support.
Even Cold War-era infrastructure isn’t always usable. Berlin estimates 20% of highways and over a quarter of highway bridges need repairs due to chronic underinvestment. Germany’s North Sea and Baltic Sea harbors need work worth €15 billion, including €3 billion for dual-use upgrades such as dock reinforcements, according to the federation of German seaports.
Such patchiness would limit the military’s freedom of movement in case of war. Chokepoints on the military’s mobility map are among the most closely guarded secrets of the blueprint.
In the short term, improving resilience means making the most of the existing road and rail networks. Longer term, Berlin aims to spend €166 billion by 2029 on infrastructure, including more than €100 billion on the long-neglected railways, and give priority to dualuse infrastructure.
Things go off script
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, Lt. Gen. André Bodemann, with drafting OPLAN. 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.
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, and striking agreements with states and the autobahn operator.
In late September, a military exercise dubbed Red Storm Bravo took place in the northern city-state of Hamburg to rehearse cooperation between the bundeswehr and the police, firefighters and civil protection units. The scenario was a miniature OPLAN in action: 500 NATO troops would land in the port to form a convoy of 65 vehicles headed eastward through the city. They would have to fend off attempts to block the port, drone attacks and protests.
The camouflaged soldiers assembled silently on the dock, helicopters circling overhead. Shortly before midnight, the convoy departed for the city.
Then things began to go offscript.
A convoy always moves as a block: Once it crosses an intersection, it doesn’t stop. No civilian vehicle should be able to insert itself into it. Yet as the column rolled through the checkpoint, officers on the sidelines bristled at the long gaps between vehicles. Later on, a black drone buzzing overhead caused a brief commotion before someone radioed in confirmation that it was the bundeswehr’s.
Then, protesters jumped from bushes and glued themselves to the tarmac ahead of the vehicles. The incident was part of the drill and the demonstrators were reservists.
Soldiers weren’t allowed to intervene. The police, which were, turned out not to have the solvents needed to unglue the mock protesters. It took two hours for the vehicles to restart. By then, it was early morning and the convoy had traveled all of 6 miles.
Sabotage
One of the biggest threats facing OPLAN is sabotage. Already, 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.
The biggest uncertainty facing the planners now is how much time they have.
“The threats are real,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz told business leaders in September. “We’re not at war, but we no longer live in peacetime.”
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