Bundeswehr
federal defence forces of Germany, and their civil administration and procurement authorities since 1955
The Bundeswehr (German: [ˈbʊndəsˌveːɐ̯] , lit. Federal Defence) are the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Bundeswehr is divided into a military part (armed forces or Streitkräfte) and a civil part. The military part consists of the four armed forces: German Army, German Navy, German Air Force and Cyber and Information Domain Service, which are supported by the Bundeswehr Joint Support Command.
As of 31 January 2026, the Bundeswehr had a strength of 186,221 active-duty military personnel and 81,205 civilians, placing it among the 30 largest military forces in the world, and making it the second largest in the European Union behind France. In addition, the Bundeswehr has approximately 860,000 reserve personnel (2025). With the German military budget at $127 billion (€108.2 billion) for 2026, the Bundeswehr is the fourth-highest-funded military in the world. Germany's defence spending had averaged approximately 1.2% of GDP over the preceding decade, well below the NATO guideline of 2%, which Germany first met in 2024. NATO's revised spending guidelines call for 3.5% of GDP allocated to defence and an additional 1.5% to critical infrastructure resilience, a threshold endorsed at the 2025 Hague summit. Germany is aiming to expand the Bundeswehr to around 203,000 soldiers by 2031 to better cope with increasing responsibilities.
The public source identifies “Bundeswehr” as federal defence forces of Germany, and their civil administration and procurement authorities since 1955. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bundeswehr, federal and defence.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Bundeswehr”, the useful work is to connect “federal defence forces of Germany, and their civil administration and procurement authorities since 1955” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56010. VIAF identifies the subject as 610145858098323022251. The Library of Congress control number is no2015002944. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2025, 2024 and 2031.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bundeswehr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.