> While the law requires men to request the permit, the spokesperson clarified, it also obliges the military career center to issue it, if "no specific military service is expected during the period in question.”
> "Since military service under current law is based exclusively on voluntary participation, such permissions must generally be granted,” the official added.
> When asked, the ministry spokesperson pointed out that "the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”
It seems like the purpose is to have the law and all the paperwork set up as a precaution for the future. Sure, right now it’s all voluntary and just rubber stamping, but if in the future they need to do something like Ukraine and lock down travel for military aged men, it’s much easier to flip a switch and start denying travel permits rather than having to set up and fund an entirely new system for requiring travel permits.
If it were to get closer to war (i.e., Spannungsfall, let alone the Verteidigungsfall) a set of laws would unlock that allow control of various areas of life and the economy anyway.
Ah, invasive extra paperwork (enforced by criminal penalties, at least in theory) for something they say on the surface they won’t actually need. So very german (hah)
In the United States, adult males have to sign up for the Selective Service for the same reason even though we haven't had conscription since the Vietnam War in the late 1970s(?).
Under U.S. federal law, men ages 18–25 must register with the Selective Service System to be eligible for most federal jobs. Federal agencies enforce this under hiring rules in 5 U.S.C. § 3328.
Nobody wants to be the guy who got the nation caught with its pants down if conscription needs to come back in a hurry. The same reason the military budget always ratchets upwards.
It is not like they had a choice. The article is about
1939, the events were well progressed then. Only very few were able to hide themselves and stay hidden for years.
It's a meaningless, feel-good rule. Every country has countless carve-outs. To give you a trivial example: in the US, you can't get a passport if you owe more than $2,500 in child support.
And "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person." Military service also serves the purpose to defend that right when the country is attacked. Rights aren't absolute, they have to be traded off against each other.
Hard to feel the same sympathy for Russian men to be honest, I've seen many gallivanting abroad, whilst majority of Ukrainian men are stuck either in hiding in their own country or have been sent to the front lines. Only a few got out early or by paying bribes.
honestly i am happy for the russian and ukranian young men and women i meet here in NL each day. Glad for them they can dodge the draft. most simply drove out, some had more hastle than others.
war is shit on all sides and thinking one or the other suffers less because you dont like their colours is very short sighted.... i think we had enough time by now to realise it.
and dont call it cowardice if someone doesnt want to fight for a bunch of 'rich pricks' playin with their money while normal people get to die in the streets. It has never been good or normal and should never be.
It's objectively worse on the Ukrainian side. Imagine you haven't been able to leave your house in 4 years for fear you'll be grabbed by a draft officer. Russians do not know this fear.
To boot, many Russian men have been paid handsomely for their participation in the SMO and get to live nice lives abroad.
The men I know try not to go unless it's absolutely necessary. The women generally prance to Russia and back all the time. (Exceptions exist, of course.)
Almost everything about societies except cities is just pretty words. Countries and most borders are just an abstraction. We fight for them because someone convinces us with words to do so. We could do the same for the UN and it would be a much nobler cause in most cases.
First of all you don't need it. Secondly, the regulation even states that the right is granted automatically anyway. Technically, the rule had been in place for the past 45+ years anyway - even when there was mandatory military service! - so it doesn't make any practical difference.
It is wonderful to see this much needed discussion on HN. There is a strong argument to be made for that we need to recalibrate rights and responsibilities of men and women. Especially since women have largely abandoned their traditional duties and still kinda expect men to hold their end of the bargain. All while constantly degrading, offending, and calling men's nature toxic. Men essentially get nothing in return for doing these deadly jobs. So let's make it truely equal as everybody wanted and conscript everyone. No sugarcoating either, equality starts from the front line.
So it's a cold war law which is still in place but not being enforced.
Same for conscription laws in the Netherlands, which are also still active. They just don't ask anyone to report for conscription. It was even expanded a couple of years before the Ukraine war to also include women.
> The new military service law requires all men under 45 to seek approval from the Bundeswehr to leave the country for longer than three months. It also obliges the military career center to issue it.
The main point was that they changed it so instead of being activated during crisis now it applies anytime, including in peacetime. Making it similar to the cold war provisions doesn't make it sounds better.
It's an important distinction because it prevents the defence of "oh it's just an old law, there are lots of old laws on the books that everyone knows aren't relevant, they can't be tidied up for political reasons".
It was suspended for the last 15 years! Surely it was easier to leave it suspended and unsuspending it is a conscious choice.
Singapore has a similar requirement called an Exit Permit. It may have changed, I don’t really know or care anymore. But the conscription was a huge driver for me to emigrate as soon as I could. I left the country 2 weeks after finishing my military service.
I'm surprised this news is stalling at 24 points. Everybody has to understand that even if this law isn't impacting you; this is a signal in the noise. Germany is a major part of the industrial military complex together with the US and still the 3rd largest economy in the world after US and China. This is meaningful as it sets course for war in Europe. And for Germans it means soon to be enforced limitations of civil rights. That fits right in with the surveillance crap that is being attempted to roll out in EU (which is effectively headed and controlled by Germany).
I don't think there is any moat here, most European countries have these kind of "deprecated" laws, that are not enforced and just stay there because it's too much of a hassle to remove. In France, I think there are still laws forbidding women to wear jeans, and requiring permission of the husband to work. Still in the text of law, but obviously non enforceable.
US has just as many if not even more. Every state has their own collection of weird laws, like donkeys are not allowed to sleep in bathtubs or dandelions are illegal to grow over a certain height.
A tangent, but I’m interested (as an American) what is the German attitude towards laws that have no enforcement or penalty? Do most people feel an obligation to observe them? Is there any social cost for disregarding them?
The population is very diverse about this I would say. Some people would stand at a red light as pedestrians until they starve to death while others don't give a fuck about anything.
I think it varies. I suspect in most common cases the lack of enforcement results from the rest of society not having an appetite to punish it. No harm done, no need to punish.
I believe jaywalking (or crossing a red light as a pedestrian) is prohibited, but you would have to do it in front of a really motivated cop (or cause an accident) to actually get a ticket for it. It is common and no one really cares - but if you were to do it in front of children or a school you will probably get disapproving looks or a somewhat stern talking to from others around you.
I think the image of the "order-loving german" is a bit of a stereotype. Some people overdo it (Calling the police for noise harassment if you still mow your lawn at 20:01), but they are generally not popular with their neighbors (or the police...)
IIRC there is actually a practice of nullifying laws that cannot be enforced (Vollzugsdefizit). One example I remember is that the enforcement of minor drug possession charges was declared unconstitutional because that law was only selectively enforced.
its a question of degree. going to the barracks when you get called up by mail vs getting grabbed off the street, punched in the face and shoved into a bus headed for the training center.
They will probably go to prison instead, like some of my friends did. Giving military training to people who definitely don't want it can be a bad idea for many reasons.
If you ever wonder what is the role of professional army in case of any serious invasion or war. Their role is to hunt for conscripts, kidnap them, and transport them to the army recruitment centers.
Thats not how most of the manpower gets there, without even knowing the Ukraine example, I venture to guess based on the superior morale of Ukrainian forces, that most are drafted willingly.
This still does not prove the very general statement GP made, which doesn't align with draft reality in historical wars
Millions of people enjoy great lives today because at least one of their ancestors were smart enough to not go to the meat grinder. While millions of young men became genetic dead ends dead in a ditch for no reason at all. Even their names forgotten forever.
Millions of people were not burned to death due to not living under Nazi rule you mean.
Most of our ancestors did join a draft, as it was universal, be it the Napoleon wars, WW1 or WW2. This interpretation of history is highly creative I will give you that
Name 10 common soldiers who liberated a concentration camp , from the top of your head. If you care so much about that as you give the impression of doing.
Are you implying that the fact there are no common soldiers famous for liberating concentration camps, means that saving further millions that would be killed by the eventual Nazi occupation of Europe, is in vain?
Silicon valley privileged mindset in Europe, what are you talking about?! You mean Piotr, Ivan, and Andrei working remotely for American company for equivalent of 60k USD annually?
Most armies in Europe, especially in post-Communist part of it, are nepotist corrupted structures. People go there for tax and housing benefits and early retirement. They are not even particularly fit, skilled, or trained to fight with an invader. Especially in these countries men aged 18-45 have absolutely nothing to fight for.
Question for German friends: What do you think about the production level of military equipment? If Russia does move (which I think is unlikely in the near future), how many days does the ammo last?
NATO has days/weeks of ammunition, so it's woefully under-resourced.
NATO doctrine is basically air superiority against any invading force, with the ability to wreak destruction far behind the front lines.
Conveniently the Iran war has depleted stockpiles of almost everything.
The reality is NATO is vulnerable on two fronts.
The first is that NATO has no defences against the kind of drone and missile waves Russia has been using against Ukraine. A surprise attack could easily take out a large part of NATO's air superiority and do significant damage to arms factories.
The second is more serious - capture of the independent nuclear deterrent. The US is clearly giving up on defending Europe, the UK's deterrent is barely functional, and only France has a truly independent deterrent.
Russia has spent a lot of time and money trying to get a puppet government elected on France, along the lines of the governments in Hungary, Slovakia, and the US.
If France stops being a deterrent Russia would be able to nuke Brussels - and perhaps a few other capitals to make the point - and likely force immediate surrender.
The question is really whether Russia can hold on until the French elections next year.
The older I get the more I can't stand "countries" as a concept. Especially this notion that somehow countries own their citizens. It's quite gross to me...
Countries do not own their citizens, citizens own their countries. Countries are a technology - albeit an old and sometimes useful technology, but a technology. This is like an iPhone requiring your permission to leave it on the counter for a day.
This idea that you're not allowed to travel without a permit is a perverse inversion of reality. People are not property and the idea that a "country" can feed human beings into one meat-grinder or another at will in order to preserve itself is the very thing that the AI safety people are panicked about. It's the paperclip maximizer, but instead of making paperclips it tries to grow and expand it's influence into all aspects of the human experience. Increasingly this disgusts me at a cellular level.
Unsurprisingly when people here engage in serious politics beyond a desire to enrich themselves, those politics tend to take on a distinctly libertarian bent. I’m not sure what else people expect though, this is a very sheltered group with relatively limited skills outside of specific technical areas.
over and over again, we see that governments are pretty bad at doing their job.
over and over again, they prove to us that they cant handle money, that they are corrupt, that they put the interest of their political class above that of the people.
so are you surprised?
id rather be left alone as much as possible in my pursuit of happiness. On my own terms!
"Fuck you got mine" is the attitude of the boomers expecting young people to die for a country that the boomers left economically and demographically ruined. Young Germans have the worst life prospects of any generation in the past fifty years.
But if you look at serious polls then not many young people will actually fight for this. I remember reading a number of around 15%...
And those probably don't have a high IQ.
Why does it exclude women? War is not just physical strength, but also logistics, operating vehicles, operating drones, nursing, and so on. All tasks that women are well capable of.
Because it would take a change to the constitution to do that while reinstating the old draft laws only takes a regular majority in parliament. The draft is a severe limitation of personal freedom, so you can't just do that by law. The draft for men is already enabled in the constitution, the draft for woman isn't.
At this moment, changing the constitution is not possible, there is no majority for this. So that pretty much took the option to change the broader parameters out of the discussion entirely.
If there were one. The closest thing is the Treaty of Lisbon, which in turn was an update on the Treaties of Maastricht and Rome.
However, the matter has been heard in the European Court of Justice in 2002, and the short version is "Community law does not preclude compulsory military service being reserved to men."
It probably could be challenged under the German constitution, but nobody knows if that would be successful. The draft for men is set up in the constitution, but there is also an explicit equality for men and women in there. In the past any challenge would almost certainly have been denied, but it's a different time now.
In practice, this draft is not a real draft yet. Nobody is actually drafted, so there are almost no practical consequences. If there was an actual draft, I'd expect to see a challenge to this.
Some countries in the EU, like mine, have funny discrimination laws that say a positive discrimination is not considered a discrimination under the law, so it cannot be challenged. It is used as the basis for all women-favoring regulations.
I wouldn't trust the European Union to be the one that will challenge that German mobilization register at all.
COVID-19 has proven that if anything, the European Union tends to spread national initiatives among other countries (and Germany is often a leader in EU).
In this specific case, the EU is more likely to be the type of organization that would think about how to create a unified permit
-> as they did with the EU Digital COVID certificate; some sort of "I am in the register of mobilization" / "have a temporary travel authorization".
So, EU might be an enemy that pretends to be your friend there.
Humbug. Defence policy, especially how the EU member states choose to organize their military forces, is very much in the hands of the individual countries. A majority of the member states don't even have conscription anymore.
Yes, there is the common security and defence policy, and the Article 42 of Lisbon and all that, but it all still relies on national systems.
That's interesting because on the face of it this none of the EU's business... but also typical of the EU and EU governments to expand what is thr EU's business little by little.
The whole existence of the EU has its background in the end of WWII.
> 18 April 1951 – European Coal and Steel Community
> Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past. The six are Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The European Coal and Steel Community comes into being in 1952.
Absolutely not. What you quote is beside the point and irrelevant.
Defence and the military is a sovereign matter that has nothing to do with the EU... except we are seeing that this is changing without democratic national mandates.
I can only repeat that defence is a sovereign matter in which the EU has no power, but there is a trend of changing this by making it happen as "fait accompli", especially since the war in Ukraine, which is used as pretext.
Theoretically yes, practically no. The ECJ can order the revision of national laws, but the country in question is responsible for implementation, and can send plaintiffs on a multi-decade merry chase. Several countries have also taken the view that they can refuse changes to their constitutions. This stands on shaky ground legally, but there is no real enforcement mechanism anyway.
Yeah, the law is unjust but spare even this part of the population this unnecessary risk. It's not like they can't join if they want to but why put force on it? So everybody feels miserable? What's the point?
A lot of draft laws haven't been touched in a long time and aren't updated for modern gender politics. Though I do wonder if they'll actually get updated ever - no politician wants to touch it and it's not like anyone is screaming for the right to be forced to go die in war.
It's always weird to me how surprised women are that every single man they know has had to specifically, actually physically ink paper to sign up for the draft. It definitely feels weird/spooky when you do it, given the implications and that despite being compulsory it's not automatically done for you.
> and that despite being compulsory it's not automatically done for you.
I though it was weird that the United States had a requirement for people to physically sign a paper to do it. It looks like only this year they made it automated.
> Beginning on December 18, 2026, the Selective Service System will be required to identify, locate, and register all male (as assigned at birth) U.S. residents 18 to 26 years old on the basis of other existing federal databases. Men will no longer be required to register themselves or be subject to penalties for failing to do so. This was noted to be the most significant change to Selective Service since the self-registration system began in 1980.
To clarify: every young person regardless of gender is legally obliged to go through fitness testing for conscription and if deemed suitable must go through it if selected. I imagine it’s roughly similar in Denmark?
Up until the fall of the USSR ~all men did go through conscription/basic military training. After the fall only the ones that wanted to and were selected did. Now it’s ramping up massively.
If, during a state of defence, the need for civilian services in the civilian health system or in stationary military hospitals cannot be met on a voluntary basis, women between the age of eighteen and fifty-five may be called upon to render such services by or pursuant to a law. Under no circumstances may they be required to render service involving the use of arms.
This is false, overwhelmingly MALES. For a time, males couldn't leave Ukraine, while females could. Those who go to die on the front in all wars are mostly males. Doesn't mean that females aren't casualties as well, they are.
Starting 2026, Ukraine at least has restrictions on women leaving the country as well.
Women in the civil service, law enforcement agencies, or those registered in the military and serving under contract may face restrictions on traveling abroad, particularly for non-official purposes.
Right, a lot of the draft law being male-only reflects a combination of the reality that, relatively speaking, not much war has been waged since the end of WW2, and that much of contemporary gender equality is still somewhat new on a historical basis. So they're really just out of date laws with not much of an impetus to update, at least until recently. The worldwide trend is pretty clearly in the direction of making service and conscription, where needed, more gender agnostic. There are still some realities that don't really change here, such as men being most useful for direct combat, so even if women are conscripted it's likely they'll still avoid much of the worst of warfare simply by virtue of not qualifying for stringent standards.
You mean "some women in specific situations", not women in general. 2 weeks ago my cousin's wife and her 2 daughters got in an out for my aunt's funeral, in Ukraine. She is 50 years old, former teacher, no restrictions, the daughters are in the early 20, no restrictions either.
The intersection of parties wanting to reinstate compulsory military service and parties supporting gender equality doesn't currently have the necessary supermajority to change the constitution. So we get a wishy-washy compromise, as is so often the case in democracies.
As far as I know as long as the change was made outside of an ongoing conflict and it's reasonable to assume it wasn't done to evade a potential one, it would actually protect you from being sent to your death
Going to assume this phrasing is an awkward translation, but we can see how this works out in tolerant nations with conscription like Thailand. Typically, trans women who are already on a medical pathway are medically excluded from military service. This is less an affirmation of who they are by the military and more of a frank admission that their current state could never be made combat-ready. It's likely that even if SHTF, this would remain the status quo, because it's difficult to imagine draft resisters taking estrogen simply to avoid service. Even if treatment is largely done via informed consent, medical exclusion would likely require blood levels be in a certain range, or certain surgeries performed.
IDK about legal situation, but I know people who transitioned in both directions and they tell me that the hormones they take do make a big difference to strength and resiliance.
Women have been treated similarly to children. Fewer rights, but also fewer responsibilities. Feminists are very vocal about the rights but not too bothered about the responsibility.
Honestly, I don't think the problem with war is that not enough women die in it. It makes more sense to argue against forcing anyone against their will to fight in a war.
How so? Why isn't the question 'Why is anyone being forced at all?' Their question assumes that someone has to be forced, which I fundamentally disagree with, so they should justify that assumption first.
> And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
Correct. They are equal, so I don't think either men or women should be forced.
Well women are the rate limiting factor in having more men produced for war fodder.
It probably makes more sense to ban birth control at the same time men are required to die for the war machine as both would then be playing out their slavery-induced biological role in ensuring survival of the nation. That is if you're down with the whole slavery for war thing.
That’s essentially what the commenter is proposing when talking about banning birth control. This would be equivalent to compelling women to reproduce (or forego sexual relations, which in reality most people won’t do).
Not only violence. There are plenty of concerning situations in which you all of a sudden stop putting middle-manager women in email jobs or HR/DEI finger-wagging jobs.
When things get existential, the jobs favored by men multiply and the jobs favored by women decrease. And nowhere more than in countries and societies which are highly feminist and supportive of women, which seems counterintuitive but isn't.
In the case of a typical war of conquest, fighting pretty much stops as soon as one nation surrenders. However, no nation state in the world asks, 'How can we save the most lives?', instead asking, 'Do we have enough people to send to their deaths to potentially preserve our monopoly of power?'
Of course, at the beginning of every war, some people genuinely believe that joining and defending the nation they live in is in their best interests, but these numbers quickly drop over time. As history and current events show, states start to use forced conscription in every prolonged war at some point.
That was also true of much of the feudal or monarchist European wars in the centuries before WWI. In the near term before the "democratic" era around WWI wars war largely seen as wars of the aristocracy and armed forces. Merchants could usually ~freely come and go between countries at war and you could generally pass to a country you were at war with without common people seeing you as an enemy. Wars also tended to be less "all or nothing" where the other side was evil and had to be destroyed and were seen more as property and rights disputes of the elite where armed force was a negotiating tactic or strategic use to assert some particular right.
It wasn't until the scam of 'democracy' fooled people into thinking war was against the actual people of the other country that they not only scammed everyone into having such buy-in and stakes for the war but also to view the other countrymen themselves as the enemy. People started viewing the nation of themselves because their laughable miniscule influence of their vote somehow means the government is of them. (Note this was a resurface of course, there were times in history where war was seen as against a peoples rather than of the elite).
Stop reading Curtis Yarvin's pseudo-history. Like 8 million people died in the Thirty Years War before modern democratic states, and there's plenty of other examples.
I agree but in countries with larger populations, there are two reasons:
1) Women can have children, and after a major war a large section of the population may be killed, and its better to have more women than men, since you can repopulate faster.
2) Women take over a large share of industrial labor during wartime. This was a mistake the Germans made in WW2, because they were so mystified by Nazism. But in the US, women basically took over all the manufacturing jobs that men left when they went to war, and it helped shore up the industrial base and, in the end, helped lead to an allied victory.
In a place like Israel, there are so few people that it doesn't make a massive difference. If half the men get taken out, its not like the 2-3 million remaining women are going to be able or even want to "repopulate" so rapidly (not to mention that Israel has an interesting setup where a small section of the women make up the majority of the births--the ultra-orthodox--and the majority probably aren't having kids anyway).
Easier to repopulate... at the expense of men being considered essentially disposable by the society. I should have as much right to not being forcefully sent to my death to wage billionaires' wars as the other half of population.
Well, you see, if men stay alive, but women are killed, society collapses eventually as not enough new people are born. It sucks being a man in this scenario, but it is what it is.
I suspect one tool governments across the world will resort to when they get desperate about sub-replacement fertility is changing mandatory conscription from males to the childless. Quite strong incentive, not be sent to the meatgrinder.
And if you include women (well, all genders) directly in the war efforts you double the amount of soldiers you have, which would increase your chance of winning and not needing to repopulate.
The key here is to refuse fighting. Nobody becomes a hero by becoming a murderer whose goal is to defend the political power of Stalin, Napoleon, Bush, or whoever.
I'm in a country ~5mil population (less than israel's) where men are conscripted and there is a fair amount of angst regarding their sacrifice. IMO, the cause is a mix of patriarchy and voteshare.
Factor #2 is no longer true, nowadays more and more stuff is being produced by machines. Moreover women can pick up guns. Drones can be piloted. Lethality is only going to go up.
No one sane would want to go fight in a war where lethality is high. Nor train for something that requires looming, recurring obligations for a good 10-20 years of their life. This is real sacrifce. If you want respect, at some point you have to put skin in the game.
There is an actual answer to this, don’t listen to the random people replying saying stuff like “because the CDU is in power” or whatever.
The actual answer is because the constitutional instrument that allows conscription (Artikel 12a Grundgesetz) is explicitly limited to men. Therefore women are not subject to conscription in Germany, unless the constitution is changed.
Perhaps if the constitution were written today instead of in 1949 it would include women too.
You are misinformed and it is pretty much because of the CDU/CSU. There was a chance to change it with the help of the CDU just after the election but before the last government got dissolved the CDU objected...
In addition to the legal point regarding the constitution: A lot less people in those roles you listed, die. The compulsion is necessary for the state to get enough people to go die - or at least, seriously risk their lives - for it on the battlefield.
It doesn't even exclude just biological women but everyone who has either "female" or "diverse" in their passport, which, according to current law, can both be biologically male.
Trans women are not male, including biologically if you assume HRT. This is overcompensating rationality to shit on a group of people that are functionally intersex for "biological" distinction.
And we're not even talking about a context where biology matters. You just wanted to vice signal.
If you want to make this an SBGG criticism, I'd love to see you even get close to proving abuse beyond singular instances. Even all the right-wingers that said they'd change their gender marker to make a point did not. Because people don't do that lightly.
What are the consequences of changing the marker? Does it impose legal requirements on people or is it a matter of identity alone? Just curious why people don't take it lightly. Identity is important so that will suffice as an explanation.
EDIT: I'm rate-limited on comments, so if you come back here and read this, thank you for sharing from experience.
I'll give Germany credit insofar that it matters less than one would think. The only identifying documents that carry this information are passport and birth certificate. Social security number if you know how to read them.
You will still have to deal with a ton of bureaucratic overhead and little moments where this is disclosed. For instance, your health insurance (and doctors) will usually know (the marker, not that you're trans, i get endometrial cancer screening recommended to me) and start to bicker about non-standard healthcare (i.e. I can get my estradiol tested at my GP, but for testosterone I need to see an endocrinologist) and your social security / employer will know (I also have at least 3 aliased social security numbers at this point).
Pure gender marker changes absent a name change are a lot less common, so it's not exactly well known territory.
Setting aside arguments over biology, avoiding getting sent to war to be blown to pieces wouldn't be a "light" reason to consider claiming gender diversity.
Most of the opposition to women in the army comes from conservatives, not from feminists. They imagine themselves injured in the trenches in need of being carried by a fellow soldier, and they conclude that women are too weak.
If a woman wants to join the army, that's great, let her and let her do the job she's best at. Even combat, I fully believe that some women can excel with unequaled merit.
I'm talking about conscription. The state grabbing women who want nothing to do with war and forcing them into the army. That's what happens to men. They say it's necessary, I guess they're probably right in various contrived scenarios, but historically it has very often not been necessary and a lot of good men were murdered by politicians for no good reason. I don't know how to fix this problem, but why would you ever advocate for deliberately dragging more women into it?
In measuring grips strength, which is a good proxy for general strength, 90% of females producing less force than 95% of males. In other words almost all men are stronger than almost all women.
An army that can't mold recruits to perform all the duties expected of a soldier is no army at all. Boot camps include a healthy amount of physical and endurance training.
Even with training the gap still persists, albeit to a lesser extent. Elite females are roughly as strong as the median male (without any extra training post drafting).
Why does the gap matter if the floor is adequate to complete assigned tasks?
There exist gaps between men as well; not everyone in a corp has to be a special forces operator! There's nothing physically grueling about pressing buttons, welding, driving, operating machinery or pushing on a joystick.
Some of the best pilots ever have been women. Whatever the population distributions are, if a woman wants to join she should be permitted to, with no presumptions about her limits. You risk never finding some of the best talent if you shut out women.
Why would they use it at all? Women have been US military soldiers for a long time. Every one of them could have had their grip strength, body strength, etc. measure - if those additional details were predictive of anything useful.
But why? Do drone controllers require massive amounts of grip? The keys for the transport coordinator keyboards require 20 pounds of pressure?
Few things in the military require brute strength. And those women who have that strength shouldn't be rejected simply because they are women.
Pragmatically, the main reason that has been true throughout all of history is that women are more valuable reproductively. A country can lose half its men in a war and still recover. The same is not true if it loses half its women.
I’m vehemently against the draft in general. I saw this war coming over a decade ago and live as an expat in part to avoid being press ganged into drone target duty.
Grip strength is a proxy for general strength, and I think it’s safe to assume strength is important in combat.
Yes, calling one's self "expat" instead of "immigrant" sounds exactly like what someone who goes elsewhere to avoid taxes and draft service, while driving up the local housing market and enjoying cheap labor, would do.
Again, if strength is important, then use strength as the draft criteria, not gender.
And, you do realize that the vast majority of the military aren't combat troops, right? Drone operator duty doesn't require high grip strength. Logistics managers don't require high general strength.
Is your sexism blinding you to the female soldiers who served in the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What do you think they were doing if not being soldiers?
A small set of counter examples do not invalidate broad generalizations. And if my state wants to commit economic suicide and there is no way for me to stop it I feel no need to join it.
Over 300,000 women were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
You have no idea what their grip strength was. You have no idea what their overall strength was. You have no idea if their duties required that strength, or if endurance, focus for long periods of time, ability to work in a group, were more imports.
Did you learn your grip strength factoid on some men's rights podcast?
Not sure Iraq and Afghanistan are the best examples of success.
I do have a good idea what their grips strength were, the US armed forces do such studies all of the time, sometimes they publish them. The statistics around this are well known. Grip strength is used as it's a good proxy and easy to do in an informal setting.
I'm very interested in health and resistance training is a part of that. I'm also interested in the social phenomena of certain ideological groupings of thought, such as 'healthy at any size' and 'women are exactly equal to men'.
How does feminism survive if this becomes the norm? If young men feel like they're expected to give more to their society it's natural to expect renumeration financial, socially or politically. Nordic countries don't seem to have this problem, but their conscription laws are quite relaxed compared to what the future will likely hold. A declining youth population almost certainly means greater youth repression (higher taxes for pensions, conscription, etc.)
Norways conscription law was much stricter until very recently. Military police was looking for me to hand deliver my draft notice up until I moved abroad because doing so allows them to charge you and imprison you if you don't show. At the time women were not called in at all. It didn't stop a rapid move towards more equality. And that eventually moved towards more women in the military. Couple that with a reduced need for recruits, and it was relaxed significantly for men.
EDIT: I moved in 2000. I finally took a call from the military police the day I landed in London, to gleefully tell them I'd left - the practice was that draft notices would not be delivered abroad, so moving effectively put an end to the matter. Norwegian law also required notifying the military if you left for more than 6 months, and provide evidence. I sent them a letter; they sent me one back demanding evidence. I told them the fact I'd received the letter was evidence and to stop bothering me. They did.
Basically, for the Americans who find this weird: In the countries in Europe where this is still a thing, this is a cold war holdover most places. When I was growing up air raid sirens were being tested monthly, and my primary schools' basement was a bomb shelter. It took a lot of time before things were relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Being able to serve is something the feminists have been fighting for the hardest over decades. The people who are trying to make young men only doing the killing the norm are the same people trying to end feminism. Therefore, there is some logic in your question.
When I was in Asia two years ago, as an American, every time I met a young Russian man escaping conscription, drinks were on me as appreciation to their commitment to world peace. I'm in South America now and it is being inundated with young Israeli men running like the Russians were. Nonetheless, I'm on the fence about how I feel buying them drinks.
I need to revise what I wrote. The protests and stance have all been against selective service for both men and woman. However, on the flip side, the stance for enlisting and volunteering are opposite. I'll let you Google that one to see if you think if "citation needed".
Do you agree that women and men should serve equally in front line combat?
I think it's misleading to credit what is happening in germany to feminism. It's a very toxic ideology and the best thing is to leave if you are discriminated by this (e.g. as young white heterosexual male).
How does the concept of the global citizen survive?
You have a group of citizens who are expected to perform military service, and another group who aren't really invested in the country and don't have to serve.
How does a government express "anti-feminism". Surely you're not suggesting a reduction in voting power for women. So what else would make it seem "fair" to men in your mind?
> Surely you're not suggesting a reduction in voting power for women.
Why not? If the male side has "getting droned your legs off and people watching it in 4k", surely everything less than that has to be on the table for the female side. Not being able to vote physically yourself (you can still influence public opinion, eg through social media, imo a far more effective action than casting 1 vote)
It won’t and it never has. It’s not like society post-1945 developed the phenomenon for the first time in human history. Even in this country, New Jersey was the last state to ban women voting in 1807 iirc.
How can a state survive if this weren't the norm? Why would men fight and die for a government that views their own wives and daughters as cannon fodder? If the government is conscripting men's wives to war, is it really in the interest of men to risk their own lives to protect that government? If the government took my wife and sent her to war, I'd sooner firebomb a government office than join up to fight for the government.
If a woman wants to fight, that's another story entirely. But conscripting women? That's poison.
There is a birth crisis. Modern, liberal women are not actually reproducing, they are not keeping their end of the evolutionary bargain (men protecting, sacrificing and dying, while women giving birth). Therefore, there is no need to maintain the old-fashioned, patriarchal system with women as a more protected group. Everyone should contribute equally, pull their own weight. Equal rights, equal lefts (responsibilities).
Western women are already only producing ~1.5 kids (many with none!), you could send 50% of young women to die in war, then have the other half have a fertility rate of 6, like what their great great grandmothers had, and we would be far far ahead already.
We're not having this conversation in a cultural vacuum; men figure out at a young age that if things go to shit, their lives become expendable for the sake of the community. I view conscription as a form of slavery; something that I hope never happens to me or anybody, but could conceivably happen. That's the way the world has worked for thousands of years, and the Bayesian meme asks me to therefore bet on it continuing to be this way. But it doesn't have to be this way for women too. Why should it be, misery loves company? If men are going to be dying, we should draft women to die too? That's not feminism, that's insanity.
Why should men sacrifice and die for nothing, by not getting anything in return, not even a simple appreciation? Why should only men die when things get tough? I also would much rather see other unknown women die, than to send myself or my son to die for them.
Women need to pull their weight. And since they aren't doing that from the evolutional POV, neither in practice (birth crisis) nor in theory (not like giving birth is a legal duty, unlike a draft), then they can at least be useful for a society as a cannon fodder. The more women start pulling their weight and contribute, the less weight there will be for men to pull. What not to love about this equality!
Taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot have gender equality without either making the draft cover everyone or abolishing it entirely.
The fact that women losing their lives is so much larger a risk for the nation only serves to test the resolve of those people claiming to want gender equality, but this is not the only time you'll find a conflict between idealism and reality, even within the scope of gender equality.
It would be equality if there were a law forcing women to have children during a war. Which is insane and no one would support it.
But young men maybe dying after being forced to fight against their will? Completely fine.
It's honestly just very telling how in modern Western egalitarianism, gender essentialism is factually wrong and evil unless we're explaining why men need to die for their country.
Chill, they will soon send robots because everybody else is going to give'em the finger or they're too slow and hard to replace. Look at Russia/Ukraine. Russia is sending minorities and North Koreans to war and they get blown up by drones assembled and flown by Ukrainians. I would totally assemble drones rather than dig trenches or crawl through mud infested with mines. Guess what the North Koreans are now doing in Kursk? De-mining.
Most young men don't have wives or daughters. It's not 1850 anymore.
I would rather both genders get drafted than be in a Ukraine situation where millions of women leave for richer countries while I am pulled off the street to go eat FPV drones. What's even the point? Why not surrender? What am I protecting or preserving?
This goes missed a lot in debates about conscription. The Iran war in the US and the Ukraine war in Russia enjoy very little popular support among military aged men. This is in stark contrast to WW2, and even in Vietnam there was still a strain of thinking of draft resisters as cowards. But wars in this day and age enjoy a shockingly tiny public mandate, and it's entirely possible that governments can only do a draft on paper. Putin is practically unable to push further mobilisation because the first round provoked such stiff violence and resistance.
Any ruler wants active units of production (humans extracting money or gold or food), and for that it has to bring some sort of stable life environment and not be too greedy so people don't try to revolt.
Whether you get such through political negotiation before or after a war, or through a vote, or through a revolution, is the same as the end.
How does a state survive if refugees/immigrants are imported en masse and then the state becomes so dysfunctional to such a degree that its male citizens must be conscripted to fight and die for it? Surely this is a recipe for disaster.
I would sooner die for my family and my country but I wouldn't lift a finger to save the lives of refugees/immigrants.
You die for your country and the refugees make the state survive. Germany becomes Deutschstan, Köln Dom is converted to a minaret and Hildegard is required to wear a hijab in public at all times, that's how. At least that's probably how Michel Houellebecq would imagine it.
Why would this affect feminism? If they want to fight for equal rights to conscription nobody is stopping them, and if they don't nobody is going to force them to. These gotchas don't really have any reflection on reality.
I am wondering if the affected men will demand preferential treatment as a consequence of service. Women currently benefit from disproportionate employment in the social safety net, affirmative action in German government hiring, etc. I would imagine that this would be essentially offensive to the men who are required to stay in the country, or face (potential future) conscription. I suspect the demands of European governments will increase as countries continue to age.
I would define feminism as the belief that on balance and in aggregate, there is a difference in the fairness that society accords to the genders and it's in favor of men.
The risk to feminism would be that this becomes so blatantly and obviously not true that no one can take it seriously. I don't think the continued draft of men would impact this because it's not a change to the status quo, and it isn't changing opinion in Ukraine.
Number of characters for the title is limited. And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country; it in deed comes as a shock. And it is also shocking that I just randomly stumbled over this news article when this law is in effect already for 3 months. How is it possible that our news talk about all sorts of nonsense but not about something as fundamentally relevant as this ... this is the real shock.
> And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country
The ends don't justify the means. Conscription has no place in the free world. It's slavery, plain and simple. Going into the military should be an appealing career choice. Our soldiers are supposed to be highly skilled professionals, not cannon fodder in large quantities.
So, if some other country with different value system attacks your homeland with intention to effectively colonize it then you'd be okay with just letting it happen?
Any country that contains millionaires while using military slaves ("conscripts") is evil. If there is clear existential risk then the state should implement wealth taxes to pay volunteer troops instead of enslaving people. And if literally everybody outside the military has been taxed down to the poverty line, and there are still not enough volunteers, it's time to surrender.
I believe it is up to the free individual to make that decision. I'm not saving the slave ship when I'm treated like one.
ps: There are 8 billion people on this planet, and I've never had any serious issues with any of them, much less a reason to start a war. Governments are always the cause of everyone's misery. Beware of yours!
The regime spent the past 50 years teaching everyone that their nation is just a source of shame and at best just a meaningless social construct, and that their culture and people's history is trash, that really nothing about it is worth saving.
And now the regime wants them to voluntarily sacrifice their lives for it.
I am also surprised that I haven't read about this in German news before. I am following the news. If Trump would have signed an executive order with a similar content affecting US citizen, German media would probably report about this multiple days long with many articles.
I was looking in Google news for other reports about this, but only found an article from Berliner Zeitung published 5 hours after this article from Frankfurter Rundschau.
I am worried about what other information which could be important to me, the news did not report on.
I agree in general. One reason we haven't heard anything about it might be that the administration already admitted that this legislation needs correction or at least clarification, as mentioned in the article.
No, that is not mentioned in the article. The correction and clarification is regarding how exactly this is being implemented. The law is there ... don't think this is a mistake. And there should be serious discussions in a society before something like that is made a law.
Drafts seem like an outdated pre-globalist concept. Die for the borders nobody respects anyway. You need to be nationalistic when it’s useful to your leaders that hate you. Of course just the natives need to die, all the immigrants won’t be doing that.
Men are biologically disposable. If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.
Women have no incentive to change that, and the small fraction of men powerful enough to change it can already exempt themselves from the meat grinder. The remaining men's opinions don't matter.
So this definitely works for hunter gatherers and that’s definitely how humans are architected, I agree.
However, if I think through what this process would look like under modern living arrangements, what would happen? Intensified serial polygamy with a massive increase in single motherhood? Full on polygamy?
Our social structures aren’t really set up to handle that. It seems like it would be so bad for society that I wouldn’t really say men are “disposable” under the current arrangement. More like they are the roof and women are the foundation, maybe.
It’s better to lose your roof than your foundation, sure, but losing your roof is still really bad. It does not really compare to, say, throwing out a paper coffee cup.
Women's lives are valuable, men's are not. This has been the case across basically all societies in human history. Losing a ton of men really doesn't matter too much - especially young, family-less men.
Losing a lot of women, though, is really really bad.
No, it literally says the law says you must seek permission if you wanna leave for more than 3 months and the govt must always grant you this if not in a war. And if you fail to seek permission nothing happens. You can ignore it without consequence.
A lot of laws head this way. Sweeping chances but not enforced so people ignore it, then later there's nothing stopping the government going back 7 years after select individuals. Just because it wasn't ever enforced doesn't mean it isn't illegal. An example is disguised employment laws for contractors in the UK (IR35)
I think it's like they want to have it on the books now so they can use it later. If they try to emergency legislate during wartime people will protest and/or flee the country the day before it starts applying.
All nation states are like that. They monopolise power and violence, and will defend that monopoly by sacrificing their citizens' lives if another state tries to infringe upon it.
I think it's clear that the interests of citizens and their state typically do not align. Unfortunately, most states have cultivated and propagated a different idea for decades, which is why so many people have a different perception of their state than the reality.
Yes you are: the article says that the permission must be granted in general by authorities (I guess no war and not active military) and no penalties for breaching it.
You are, but it's a shit law and surprising to still exist in Germany. Per the article it's not a new law, has been in effect since the 80s, and there have been no repercussions for violating this law.
Instead, my 2c, should have changed it to a notice you have to send the military, at most.
With all your respect the guidelines also mention this:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
anyway, if you refused to be drafted and did not want to go to jail, you had to more-or-less stop using any government services, rent with roommates, avoid using a credit card etc. until you've reached some age, and then you could emerge again because the duty to serve expires at that certain (not very high) age. It was cuh-razy.
I had to go to the draft office in that time and behaved so badly that they didn't want to take me.
Also at that time only some people had to go to the draft, because they had not the capacity to take everyone. That made it likely easy for them to let go of suboptimal candidates.
As you said, you can only object if it goes against your conscience, but if you are against it for political reasons (e.g. you don't think its worth it to die for Germany), that's not a valid reason and your objection will be denied. They were also incredibly strict during the Cold War, only easing off a bit afterwards when they wanted a smaller military.
What's a reason that is politically and not against one's conscience? I assumed that one's political beliefs would also manifest in conscience.
The cold war has been over for a very long time. The whole process was reformed in 1984 by removing the mandatory oral hearing. Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995. That's not good enough (should be 100%), but not terrible either.
> What's a reason that is politically and not against one's conscience? I assumed that one's political beliefs would also manifest in conscience.
For example, I don't think it's in my interest to defend or die for the German state. However, I would use violence to protect my life if someone tried to kill me or threatened my life directly. The German state would interpret this as a political objection rather than a conscientious one, since I am willing to use violence in principle. If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.
> Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995.
Yes, as I said, after the Cold War, Germany no longer wanted to maintain such a large army, so they started accepting any reasonably well-written argument. But in any war, you can see that nation states will start struggling to recruit new soldiers as it becomes obvious to the population that it's a rather pointless endeavour to die for their state. So, they start forcing people. We've seen that in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, USA, etc.
Thanks for clarifying! I did some own research and apparaently in those oral hearings, objectors were often tricked into contradicting themselves with quite absurd scenarios.
>If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.
That is a complete fantasy of yours. Political convictions are explicitly stated as a valid type of justification for conscientious objection by the Act on Conscientious Objection to Military Service. It even states the reasons do not have to be logical or objectively comprehensible, which easily covers your "I'm not opposed to all violence in all theoretically cases, but I fundamentally reject service for the German state".
On the contrary, it says that even if you object, they can force you into "alternative service" without the use of arms. So they make you a soldier without a gun, or rather - a state slave.
If the U.S. implements a draft, will women be required to register? Right now, only men are required to register with the Selected Service when they turn 18. Would Congress amend the Military Selective Service Act?
> When asked, the ministry spokesperson pointed out that "the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”
The famed German rule-following in action. This kind of routine violation of regulation is what led to Dieselgate. Social norms in places like this rarely support rule of law. There's a reason the EPA was the one which blew this wide open. Local regulators follow these norms because that's what German cultural norms are.
The EPA was able to do this because they made up some new numbers and set an arbitrary deadline. The same cars the year before were fine. The EPA altered the deal and then exacted punishment.
Article 21
1. Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic
features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority,
property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
That doesn’t mean it’s unenforceable. You don’t need a permit to leave Germany to any country as long as your planned stay is shorter than 3 month. The only way this could be enforced is by checking if people are in country, that is in case of drafting them. The paragraph essentially ensures that any person that gets drafted needs to present themselves in person within 3 month of the draft notice.
Welcome to Dubai, German habibis, you can join all the Russians fleeing their draft here. Still a lot less likely to get hit by a drone here than to die when fighting on the frontlines in Europe.
I'm pretty sure it's politics. The reason is a potential draft, but it is also very potential for now and may never happen. So this message signalizes to the older and/or richer population two messages - "you will be protected by the mobilized army in the worst case" and "you personally will be exempt from the need to sit in a freezing trench for multiple years" (which is not true in reality, if the draft will be needed, higher age will be increased to 60 most likely). So the older and conservative population is appeased this way.
CDU are losing popularity if we are to believe press, so that is one of the populist ways to boost some numbers for elections.
diminishing returns. people over 40 heal less quickly, start to run into chronic health issues, and are more likely to have suffered permanent injuries. it's easier to set a global cutoff at an age where the probability that any given person will be unable to do the job safely than it is to assess each person individually.
Let's see ... On December 5, 2025 the German parliament passed a law requiring all men between 18 and 45 years to register "for military service", which everyone should fully understand to mean to register for conscription.
Oh and they've added a very political clause: the government can activate conscription WITHOUT a parliament vote. So most political parties who have voted in favor of conscription want to be able to claim "it wasn't us, it was Merz" (ie. CDU). In reality CSU and SPD have voted to effectively conscript German men between 18 and 45.
In other words, Germany expects to be in open war in a matter of months to years. Like every country before them they've decided young men are cheaper than actually investing in military equipment (they're investing in military equipment, but they just won't have it in that time period)
This probably means that if you can get out, get out, because it's not like being 46 years old will protect you from the impact of that, and yes it's not clear what the timing is going to be, and they're not being very forward about what the reason is for conscription.
So that's why 45. Because the existing conscription law (1954 + 2025) allows for conscripting every German male between 18 and 45.
But the US, for all its militarism, and all its military adventures, has not used the draft since Vietnam.
So I would say that Germany sees the need to be in a position where it can respond quickly if they need it. Well, given current events in their neighborhood, I can see their point. In fact, I would say that they are probably at least three years late in doing this.
I mean, short term it's obvious what will happen. Europe's peace at all costs (or should I say: at NO cost) will fail and Russia will attack in a matter of years. Some states will be forced to defend and a number of European countries will respond as a coalition. Many other European states will refuse to help, a few very publicly. And obviously this coalition will either beat Russia back or at the very least stop Russia advancing much at all. So far the obvious part of the next few years.
Let's start with an easy one: Will Germany be ready (war is more than cheap bodies, after all, equipment, plans, ...)? No, they won't. They've never been ready before.
Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt.
What will Germany's reaction be to the European states that just don't help?
What will happen to world trade? The question is who will save it, because the historical answer was of course US.
I am a US citizen and I try to see the world as it is.
>Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt. With the current commander in chief, the US will do nothing except talk a lot of nonsense contradicting itself daily.
>What will happen to world trade?. World trade as we know it is done. National security interests will force strategic industries to be on-shored. New trade deals will only be made with a short list of trustworthy allies.
If Russia does attack, the US will take 1+ years to ramp up and we will take a long time before we reach Europe in large numbers. The rapid reaction forces we have are not prepared for the new way of fighting we see in Ukraine.
It is very likely this was done intentionally. Maybe not all people involved in making this law noticed it, but the person working on article 2 did this intentionally. They explicitly list that this article is always active now:
> (3) Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45.
Highly doubt it. This is a very new addition. Their fuck up was to pretend for ideological reasons that a country doesn't need an army. And that the concept of considering a country home and its culture as something worth preserving is just right wing bs. Now they are surprised that only very few men deliberately registered for armed service ...
The quotes very much read to me like someone realizing what the change of Paragraph 2 means to Paragraph 3 means in real time and having to figure out what to answer to journalists.
I’m curious how that would work administratively though - would they require you to have that when trying to do Ausmeldung? And what about those who moved out before this law got changed?
Technically, do I need to go Bundeswehr office when I come back next time, to get the permission?
I _want_ to believe if this was a deliberate change that someone cared about; we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now because there would be clear answers to the very obvious questions here, but maybe my hope is misplaced.
I'm not sure you understand how laws are made. It's not like "ooops a new law, who did that?" It's going through all sorts of processes with lots of people involved. And even if this is just an "innocent mistake", well, that would mean our government is run by a bunch of incompetent morons ...
Even NATO generals aren`t talking about Russia invading Germany anytime soon. It`s all about securing NATO territory in the Baltics. Confusing this with "considering a country home and its culture as something worth preserving" when there is no threat to German soil is misleading.
Note that this law still exists because it requires a constitutional change to include women (well, or to be abandoned). A constitutional change of the Grundgesetzbuch requires a 2/3rd majority in the parliament. That almost never happens these days, especially with green/left/social party being not really united anymore in their votes and the conservatives allying themselves with the far right.
The last time Germany had that much of a majority, it was under Bundeskanzler Kohl and Schroeder if I remember correctly. So like ~25 years ago.
The article 3 of the Wehrpflichtgesetzes says this:
> (2) Männliche Personen haben nach Vollendung des 17. Lebensjahres eine Genehmigung des zuständigen Karrierecenters der Bundeswehr einzuholen, wenn sie die Bundesrepublik Deutschland länger als drei Monate verlassen wollen, ohne dass die Voraussetzungen des § 1 Absatz 2 bereits vorliegen. Das Gleiche gilt, wenn sie über einen genehmigten Zeitraum hinaus außerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland verbleiben wollen oder einen nicht genehmigungspflichtigen Aufenthalt außerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland über drei Monate ausdehnen wollen. Die Genehmigung ist für den Zeitraum zu erteilen, in dem die männliche Person für eine Einberufung zum Wehrdienst nicht heransteht. Über diesen Zeitraum hinaus ist sie zu erteilen, soweit die Versagung für die männliche Person eine besondere – im Bereitschafts-, Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall eine unzumutbare – Härte bedeuten würde; § 12 Absatz 6 ist entsprechend anzuwenden. Das Bundesministerium der Verteidigung kann Ausnahmen von der Genehmigungspflicht zulassen.
The article 3 of the Wehrpflichtgesetzes was previously only active in a war or close to war situation (Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall). Article 2 said this before:
> § 2 Geltung der folgenden Vorschriften
> Die §§ 3 bis 53 gelten im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
> (1) Die nachfolgenden Vorschriften gelten nach Maßgabe der folgenden Absätze.
> (2) Die §§ 3 bis 52 gelten im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
> (3) Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45.
> (4) Die §§ 15a und 16 sind nur auf Betroffene anzuwenden, die nach dem 31. Dezember 2007 geboren sind. Satz 1 gilt nicht im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
First of all, there is no process yet for exactly requesting permission, secondly, the army already said they will not enforce the rule unless the Parliament declares combat readiness is necessary, and lastly, there is no punishment for not asking permission at this point in time.
And to be completely honest, if more people made use of registering for the damn ELEFAND emergency contact list, this rule wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
So, men are kind of responsible for this themselves by being lazy.
I had to help exfil Germans in Kabul when the US decided to pull out without telling all of their partners in time.
Everyone wanted to be rescued, but you have no idea how many German idiots travel to foreign countries, not even taking five minutes to let their own government know how to reach them and where they went in case of an emergency.
It’s super fun to drive around Kabul and pick up 55 years old complaining male Germans yelling at me because I told them I transport people, not their fucking luggage. Two even sued me afterwards for leaving their expensive camera equipment behind. A dozen complaints about my behavior.
Sometimes it’s really annoying to protect the average citizen. Luckily, I understand that it is an extreme situation for them. Just like some people sue nurses after they broke their ribs reviving their dead ass.
It’s a good thing all these idiots now have to ask for permission in the future and likely need to leave the data necessary so it’s known where they are, for how long and how to reach them.
just want to point out you started at this headline is misleading and meandered to agreeing with this being a law now and it was made for a reason and it will be enforced sooner or later. and that's effectively the headline + you think it's a good thing.
Thank you, I suspect the _de in your username means you are German or German-speaking?
A friend from the US sent the link to this thread to me, asking about it.
The source website has no ability to be switched to English language, so all information my friend got was from the headline, which without context was misleading for him. If it was clear people wouldn’t ask German-speaking friends to explain this to them, don’t you think?
And if we are really precise, right now German men don’t need to request permission, because there is neither a process nor any paperwork in place to request permission.
Without being able to see and understand the context, the headline on its own is misleading in my opinion.
Just do an experiment for yourself.
Take the original transcript from any trump speech during the Iran war and put it in a German translator. You will understand it’s about the Iran war but you will be surprised how insane those speeches sound if you are not able to understand English and rely on Google Translate to understand the context.
That’s fine. I don’t want to get into a discussion about how important the accuracy of translation is with topics like law, civil rights, military, etc.
I trust humans. I don’t trust machines. You do you.
Thank you for the exchange and pointing out my inaccuracy.
I will try to do better next time.
Have a good day and enjoy your Easter holidays if you’re Christian.
> First of all, there is no process yet for exactly requesting permission, secondly, the army already said they will not enforce the rule unless the Parliament declares combat readiness is necessary, and lastly, there is no punishment for not asking permission at this point in time.
Previously this article 3 was only active in the "Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall" which the Parliament has to declare. The law was extended with: "Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45." so this article is always active now.
For decades they have alienated their own native population, especially men. And now they want to conscript them as their approval ratings are around 15℅.
Think about it, Trump approval rating fell sharply but is still at about 40%. Merz is at 15% and most of those 15% are probably boomers in a nursing home. He is probably closer to 0% within the demographic he is trying to conscript.
The only war you're gonna get in Europe is a civil war.
> For decades they have alienated their own native population, especially men. And now they want to conscript them as their approval ratings are around 15℅.
In particular concerning the military conscription (laws), there exists a cross-generational opposition to these.
I just post two famous songs concerning this topic (if you know German):
Franz Josef Degenhardt - Befragung eines Kriegsdienstverweigerers [40
Interrogation of a conscientious objector] (1972)
Yes the US has a more insidious "hidden" law that I'm amazed Trump has not used to his advantage. It's a felony for the younger illegal immigrants males who are eligible to not register for the draft (most visa and legally visa exempt tourists are exempt, but the exemption falls off if you fall out of status). Almost none of them do, meaning almost all undocumented military-age-males are actively committing a serious crime.
Because citizenship is a commitment, not merely a set of privileges. If you obtain a citizenship (or have it imposed on you upon birth), it comes with a set of duties other residents and visitors do not have. The duty to defend your country is a traditional one.
Some countries may conscript non-citizens or allow them to serve voluntarily. Often because they are more likely to use the military as an extension of foreign policy rather than for defense. Others may see it a waste of effort, as those people are probably not sufficiently committed to the continued existence of the country.
Because not only that the immigrants have no allegiance to Germany, most have different culture and sometimes incompatible values.
I grew up in the Middle East and I can tell that cultural differences and values were more smooth and compatible than what I saw in Germany. Conscription requires a degree of trust in the people you give guns to and expect to fight on your side in case it is needed, that is mostly not true with immigrants in all times and all countries.
There are a lot of non-white citizens of Canada (and Germany) whereas the comment you’re replying to is about non-citizens. Also Canada hasn’t had conscription for a long time as far as I know, the friends you refer to were volunteers.
This comment doesn't make much sense. Are you implying German taxes are buying Russian oil and so funding the war in Ukraine? If so, that's a very partial reading of what's happened in recent years. Europe went through a huge and very painful transition away from Russian oil and gas. Germany in particular found this very difficult, but AFAICT it's mostly complete and Germany has prioritised renewables.
Energy is currently expensive because an orange maniac has started a war that only seems to benefit Russia.
You can't have a country that doesn't have conscription in time of war. For example if Russia were to attack which is unlikely but plausible. I don't like conscription at all and it's necessary but still an evil.
There's a very cold-blooded but good reason why a nation rationally should use men as cannon fodder before women: they are more expendable in terms of reproduction. You need fewer men relative to women. Also, societies with more men than women tend to be unstable and high-crime and whatnot. Societies with more women than men survive a bit better.
>Political representation in just about every country (including Germany) already skews pretty heavily towards men.
There is absolutely nowhere in the West where this is true. Even the suggestion that a politician advocates for men's rights would be the end of their career, meanwhile they endlessly twerk for women's votes with all of the right campaign promises of cash and prizes. Some countries even now have ministers explicitly representing women.
The US 2024 election saw the election of a whole regime of very male chauvinistic types, and that’s being as neutral and charitable as I can be.
In the EU there’s a number of fairly far right parties with adjacent views polling well with a chance to win significant representation in future elections.
Asia is very heavily male led, probably more than the West. Same with the Middle East.
Around the world most state and corporate heads and high level bureaucrats are male.
There has been, in the West, a push for more female representation and it has made some headway but the world’s capitols and board rooms are still very much a sausage party.
The gender pay gap only comes up for women in the boardroom and the tennis competition circuit...not in the job queue for bricklayers, roofers and garbage removers...
No, it literally says the law says you must seek permission if you wanna leave for more than 3 months and the govt must always grant you this if not in a war. And if you fail to seek permission nothing happens. You can ignore it without consequence.
Well, 2 wrongs make one right, don't they?!
I wish we'd first fix women's rights and then extend their duties. What the OP does is just egoistically trying to make other groups also suffer.
I don't have intentions to justify an injustice. I'm saying why should we try to make it even harder for a disadvantaged group? It does not help a single German man if women also have to comply to this law.
Fixing women's rights on the other hand gives everybody the benefit of living in a society that is more fair. For me, that's a valuable goal.
It’s not a fact though. I support the draft for women. For me, that’s what feminism is. I’m sure you can point out some feminists that are only for drafting men, but that’s not what you stated, you stated a patent falsehood, dressed up as a “fact” so you could dunk on feminism.
Not even close. Territorial disputes are incredibly common in nature. Humans are relatively rare in that we're capable of understanding that depriving competitors of resources will eventually lead to their deaths, but that is the ultimate result of winning a territory dispute in nature too.
> "Since military service under current law is based exclusively on voluntary participation, such permissions must generally be granted,” the official added.
> When asked, the ministry spokesperson pointed out that "the regulation was already in place during the Cold War and had no practical relevance; in particular, there are no penalties for violating it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System
If it hasn’t been used in 50 years, is there some other use for the registry or the organization or why hasn’t this been cut yet?
https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=42...
Of course, this is old times now, but here is the same, there is no benefit to register, and you increase your risk to die.
Don't do it.
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
https://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/universal-declaration/...
The UN acknowledges this conflict to some extent; https://www.ohchr.org/en/conscientious-objection
And as per usual because its harmful to men no one cares.
war is shit on all sides and thinking one or the other suffers less because you dont like their colours is very short sighted.... i think we had enough time by now to realise it.
and dont call it cowardice if someone doesnt want to fight for a bunch of 'rich pricks' playin with their money while normal people get to die in the streets. It has never been good or normal and should never be.
To boot, many Russian men have been paid handsomely for their participation in the SMO and get to live nice lives abroad.
Because the answer is obvious - Ukraine fights war.
Because since mass armies are the case it always was so, and all can men do now is whine on the internet, because they are not going to do anything.
> Does that sound equal and civil to you?
Not really, but however it sounds has no impact of it being the case.
> note we are not living in middle ages
In middle ages most men had no obligation to fight wars.
But it is very easy to see from this all that some people are very vocal about equality when in reality they want privileges.
Same for conscription laws in the Netherlands, which are also still active. They just don't ask anyone to report for conscription. It was even expanded a couple of years before the Ukraine war to also include women.
New. Not cold war. This didn't exist before.
It was suspended for the last 15 years! Surely it was easier to leave it suspended and unsuspending it is a conscious choice.
I believe jaywalking (or crossing a red light as a pedestrian) is prohibited, but you would have to do it in front of a really motivated cop (or cause an accident) to actually get a ticket for it. It is common and no one really cares - but if you were to do it in front of children or a school you will probably get disapproving looks or a somewhat stern talking to from others around you.
I think the image of the "order-loving german" is a bit of a stereotype. Some people overdo it (Calling the police for noise harassment if you still mow your lawn at 20:01), but they are generally not popular with their neighbors (or the police...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busification
Is there any unforced conscription? By definition conscription is compulsory.
Usually when your country is invaded you don't stay in your silicon valley privileged mindset and you go to conscription willingly
This still does not prove the very general statement GP made, which doesn't align with draft reality in historical wars
Most of our ancestors did join a draft, as it was universal, be it the Napoleon wars, WW1 or WW2. This interpretation of history is highly creative I will give you that
Are you implying that the fact there are no common soldiers famous for liberating concentration camps, means that saving further millions that would be killed by the eventual Nazi occupation of Europe, is in vain?
Most armies in Europe, especially in post-Communist part of it, are nepotist corrupted structures. People go there for tax and housing benefits and early retirement. They are not even particularly fit, skilled, or trained to fight with an invader. Especially in these countries men aged 18-45 have absolutely nothing to fight for.
NATO doctrine is basically air superiority against any invading force, with the ability to wreak destruction far behind the front lines.
Conveniently the Iran war has depleted stockpiles of almost everything.
The reality is NATO is vulnerable on two fronts.
The first is that NATO has no defences against the kind of drone and missile waves Russia has been using against Ukraine. A surprise attack could easily take out a large part of NATO's air superiority and do significant damage to arms factories.
The second is more serious - capture of the independent nuclear deterrent. The US is clearly giving up on defending Europe, the UK's deterrent is barely functional, and only France has a truly independent deterrent.
Russia has spent a lot of time and money trying to get a puppet government elected on France, along the lines of the governments in Hungary, Slovakia, and the US.
If France stops being a deterrent Russia would be able to nuke Brussels - and perhaps a few other capitals to make the point - and likely force immediate surrender.
The question is really whether Russia can hold on until the French elections next year.
Countries do not own their citizens, citizens own their countries. Countries are a technology - albeit an old and sometimes useful technology, but a technology. This is like an iPhone requiring your permission to leave it on the counter for a day.
This idea that you're not allowed to travel without a permit is a perverse inversion of reality. People are not property and the idea that a "country" can feed human beings into one meat-grinder or another at will in order to preserve itself is the very thing that the AI safety people are panicked about. It's the paperclip maximizer, but instead of making paperclips it tries to grow and expand it's influence into all aspects of the human experience. Increasingly this disgusts me at a cellular level.
To put it another way this forum skews selfish.
This is not to say that the government should get blind faith, but some notions that the collective good has any value is alien to many people here.
Libertarianism is a societal disease. "Fuck you got mine".
so are you surprised?
id rather be left alone as much as possible in my pursuit of happiness. On my own terms!
At this moment, changing the constitution is not possible, there is no majority for this. So that pretty much took the option to change the broader parameters out of the discussion entirely.
However, the matter has been heard in the European Court of Justice in 2002, and the short version is "Community law does not preclude compulsory military service being reserved to men."
For more details, feel free to study the legal opinion behind the ruling: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
In practice, this draft is not a real draft yet. Nobody is actually drafted, so there are almost no practical consequences. If there was an actual draft, I'd expect to see a challenge to this.
COVID-19 has proven that if anything, the European Union tends to spread national initiatives among other countries (and Germany is often a leader in EU).
In this specific case, the EU is more likely to be the type of organization that would think about how to create a unified permit
-> as they did with the EU Digital COVID certificate; some sort of "I am in the register of mobilization" / "have a temporary travel authorization".
So, EU might be an enemy that pretends to be your friend there.
Yes, there is the common security and defence policy, and the Article 42 of Lisbon and all that, but it all still relies on national systems.
There is a new military Schengen project to make troops and unified military documentation across whole EU.
Obviously there will need to be a registry of personnel there, so these people can be prevented to leave.
On the side you have SIS Schengen, where you can (already) have an active arrest warrant for desertion.
Nothing indicates that European Union is going to fight against such registries. It's even the opposite.
> 18 April 1951 – European Coal and Steel Community
> Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past. The six are Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The European Coal and Steel Community comes into being in 1952.
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Why wouldn’t a unified permit to prove you registered for mobilization be relevant to what the EU is for?
Defence and the military is a sovereign matter that has nothing to do with the EU... except we are seeing that this is changing without democratic national mandates.
This is the EU describing its own history and beginnings.
I can only repeat that defence is a sovereign matter in which the EU has no power, but there is a trend of changing this by making it happen as "fait accompli", especially since the war in Ukraine, which is used as pretext.
Yeah, the law is unjust but spare even this part of the population this unnecessary risk. It's not like they can't join if they want to but why put force on it? So everybody feels miserable? What's the point?
And yeah, ich habe treu und tapfer verteidigt...
It's always weird to me how surprised women are that every single man they know has had to specifically, actually physically ink paper to sign up for the draft. It definitely feels weird/spooky when you do it, given the implications and that despite being compulsory it's not automatically done for you.
I though it was weird that the United States had a requirement for people to physically sign a paper to do it. It looks like only this year they made it automated.
> Beginning on December 18, 2026, the Selective Service System will be required to identify, locate, and register all male (as assigned at birth) U.S. residents 18 to 26 years old on the basis of other existing federal databases. Men will no longer be required to register themselves or be subject to penalties for failing to do so. This was noted to be the most significant change to Selective Service since the self-registration system began in 1980.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System
To clarify: every young person regardless of gender is legally obliged to go through fitness testing for conscription and if deemed suitable must go through it if selected. I imagine it’s roughly similar in Denmark?
Up until the fall of the USSR ~all men did go through conscription/basic military training. After the fall only the ones that wanted to and were selected did. Now it’s ramping up massively.
https://youtu.be/jO1vWxUqpFI
Specially article 12a Paragraph 4: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
Specifically it says:
If, during a state of defence, the need for civilian services in the civilian health system or in stationary military hospitals cannot be met on a voluntary basis, women between the age of eighteen and fifty-five may be called upon to render such services by or pursuant to a law. Under no circumstances may they be required to render service involving the use of arms.
This is false, overwhelmingly MALES. For a time, males couldn't leave Ukraine, while females could. Those who go to die on the front in all wars are mostly males. Doesn't mean that females aren't casualties as well, they are.
Women in the civil service, law enforcement agencies, or those registered in the military and serving under contract may face restrictions on traveling abroad, particularly for non-official purposes.
I thought it was obvious with the second paragraph
The intersection of parties wanting to reinstate compulsory military service and parties supporting gender equality doesn't currently have the necessary supermajority to change the constitution. So we get a wishy-washy compromise, as is so often the case in democracies.
Look at $$4. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_12a.html
You could of course require women to register, too. In case of war, they'll be drafted into hospitals. They just don't want to.
The registered gender is the one that counts.
And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
How so? Why isn't the question 'Why is anyone being forced at all?' Their question assumes that someone has to be forced, which I fundamentally disagree with, so they should justify that assumption first.
> And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
Correct. They are equal, so I don't think either men or women should be forced.
It probably makes more sense to ban birth control at the same time men are required to die for the war machine as both would then be playing out their slavery-induced biological role in ensuring survival of the nation. That is if you're down with the whole slavery for war thing.
Fixed that for you.
When things get existential, the jobs favored by men multiply and the jobs favored by women decrease. And nowhere more than in countries and societies which are highly feminist and supportive of women, which seems counterintuitive but isn't.
Of course, at the beginning of every war, some people genuinely believe that joining and defending the nation they live in is in their best interests, but these numbers quickly drop over time. As history and current events show, states start to use forced conscription in every prolonged war at some point.
I’m assuming non military casualties were evenly spread between male and female.
It wasn't until the scam of 'democracy' fooled people into thinking war was against the actual people of the other country that they not only scammed everyone into having such buy-in and stakes for the war but also to view the other countrymen themselves as the enemy. People started viewing the nation of themselves because their laughable miniscule influence of their vote somehow means the government is of them. (Note this was a resurface of course, there were times in history where war was seen as against a peoples rather than of the elite).
1) Women can have children, and after a major war a large section of the population may be killed, and its better to have more women than men, since you can repopulate faster.
2) Women take over a large share of industrial labor during wartime. This was a mistake the Germans made in WW2, because they were so mystified by Nazism. But in the US, women basically took over all the manufacturing jobs that men left when they went to war, and it helped shore up the industrial base and, in the end, helped lead to an allied victory.
In a place like Israel, there are so few people that it doesn't make a massive difference. If half the men get taken out, its not like the 2-3 million remaining women are going to be able or even want to "repopulate" so rapidly (not to mention that Israel has an interesting setup where a small section of the women make up the majority of the births--the ultra-orthodox--and the majority probably aren't having kids anyway).
If you all agree to refuse to fight, you win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
The key here is to refuse fighting. Nobody becomes a hero by becoming a murderer whose goal is to defend the political power of Stalin, Napoleon, Bush, or whoever.
Factor #2 is no longer true, nowadays more and more stuff is being produced by machines. Moreover women can pick up guns. Drones can be piloted. Lethality is only going to go up.
No one sane would want to go fight in a war where lethality is high. Nor train for something that requires looming, recurring obligations for a good 10-20 years of their life. This is real sacrifce. If you want respect, at some point you have to put skin in the game.
The actual answer is because the constitutional instrument that allows conscription (Artikel 12a Grundgesetz) is explicitly limited to men. Therefore women are not subject to conscription in Germany, unless the constitution is changed.
Perhaps if the constitution were written today instead of in 1949 it would include women too.
In addition to the legal point regarding the constitution: A lot less people in those roles you listed, die. The compulsion is necessary for the state to get enough people to go die - or at least, seriously risk their lives - for it on the battlefield.
And we're not even talking about a context where biology matters. You just wanted to vice signal.
If you want to make this an SBGG criticism, I'd love to see you even get close to proving abuse beyond singular instances. Even all the right-wingers that said they'd change their gender marker to make a point did not. Because people don't do that lightly.
EDIT: I'm rate-limited on comments, so if you come back here and read this, thank you for sharing from experience.
You will still have to deal with a ton of bureaucratic overhead and little moments where this is disclosed. For instance, your health insurance (and doctors) will usually know (the marker, not that you're trans, i get endometrial cancer screening recommended to me) and start to bicker about non-standard healthcare (i.e. I can get my estradiol tested at my GP, but for testosterone I need to see an endocrinologist) and your social security / employer will know (I also have at least 3 aliased social security numbers at this point).
Pure gender marker changes absent a name change are a lot less common, so it's not exactly well known territory.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/sbgg/__9.html
I'm talking about conscription. The state grabbing women who want nothing to do with war and forcing them into the army. That's what happens to men. They say it's necessary, I guess they're probably right in various contrived scenarios, but historically it has very often not been necessary and a lot of good men were murdered by politicians for no good reason. I don't know how to fix this problem, but why would you ever advocate for deliberately dragging more women into it?
Why does the gap matter if the floor is adequate to complete assigned tasks?
There exist gaps between men as well; not everyone in a corp has to be a special forces operator! There's nothing physically grueling about pressing buttons, welding, driving, operating machinery or pushing on a joystick.
But why? Do drone controllers require massive amounts of grip? The keys for the transport coordinator keyboards require 20 pounds of pressure?
Few things in the military require brute strength. And those women who have that strength shouldn't be rejected simply because they are women.
Pragmatically, the main reason that has been true throughout all of history is that women are more valuable reproductively. A country can lose half its men in a war and still recover. The same is not true if it loses half its women.
Grip strength is a proxy for general strength, and I think it’s safe to assume strength is important in combat.
Again, if strength is important, then use strength as the draft criteria, not gender.
And, you do realize that the vast majority of the military aren't combat troops, right? Drone operator duty doesn't require high grip strength. Logistics managers don't require high general strength.
Is your sexism blinding you to the female soldiers who served in the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What do you think they were doing if not being soldiers?
You have no idea what their grip strength was. You have no idea what their overall strength was. You have no idea if their duties required that strength, or if endurance, focus for long periods of time, ability to work in a group, were more imports.
Did you learn your grip strength factoid on some men's rights podcast?
I do have a good idea what their grips strength were, the US armed forces do such studies all of the time, sometimes they publish them. The statistics around this are well known. Grip strength is used as it's a good proxy and easy to do in an informal setting.
I'm very interested in health and resistance training is a part of that. I'm also interested in the social phenomena of certain ideological groupings of thought, such as 'healthy at any size' and 'women are exactly equal to men'.
EDIT: I moved in 2000. I finally took a call from the military police the day I landed in London, to gleefully tell them I'd left - the practice was that draft notices would not be delivered abroad, so moving effectively put an end to the matter. Norwegian law also required notifying the military if you left for more than 6 months, and provide evidence. I sent them a letter; they sent me one back demanding evidence. I told them the fact I'd received the letter was evidence and to stop bothering me. They did.
Basically, for the Americans who find this weird: In the countries in Europe where this is still a thing, this is a cold war holdover most places. When I was growing up air raid sirens were being tested monthly, and my primary schools' basement was a bomb shelter. It took a lot of time before things were relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union.
When I was in Asia two years ago, as an American, every time I met a young Russian man escaping conscription, drinks were on me as appreciation to their commitment to world peace. I'm in South America now and it is being inundated with young Israeli men running like the Russians were. Nonetheless, I'm on the fence about how I feel buying them drinks.
If any claim ever required "citation needed", this one is the biggest.
I've never seen feminists fight for duties, only for privileges.
Do you agree that women and men should serve equally in front line combat?
Not heard anyone fight for that once. The more pressing issues seem to he "mansplaining" and men being shirtless in the summer.
> Nonetheless, I'm on the fence about how I feel buying them drinks.
Why?
You have a group of citizens who are expected to perform military service, and another group who aren't really invested in the country and don't have to serve.
Why not? If the male side has "getting droned your legs off and people watching it in 4k", surely everything less than that has to be on the table for the female side. Not being able to vote physically yourself (you can still influence public opinion, eg through social media, imo a far more effective action than casting 1 vote)
If a woman wants to fight, that's another story entirely. But conscripting women? That's poison.
It's not the case with 1 woman and 20 men.
Women need to pull their weight. And since they aren't doing that from the evolutional POV, neither in practice (birth crisis) nor in theory (not like giving birth is a legal duty, unlike a draft), then they can at least be useful for a society as a cannon fodder. The more women start pulling their weight and contribute, the less weight there will be for men to pull. What not to love about this equality!
No, it's equality.
Taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot have gender equality without either making the draft cover everyone or abolishing it entirely.
The fact that women losing their lives is so much larger a risk for the nation only serves to test the resolve of those people claiming to want gender equality, but this is not the only time you'll find a conflict between idealism and reality, even within the scope of gender equality.
But young men maybe dying after being forced to fight against their will? Completely fine.
It's honestly just very telling how in modern Western egalitarianism, gender essentialism is factually wrong and evil unless we're explaining why men need to die for their country.
I would rather both genders get drafted than be in a Ukraine situation where millions of women leave for richer countries while I am pulled off the street to go eat FPV drones. What's even the point? Why not surrender? What am I protecting or preserving?
> Why not surrender? Surrendering is not always practicable. You will get killed if you're a liability to your captors.
> What am I protecting or preserving? That's really only yours, and yours alone, to consider.
Any ruler wants active units of production (humans extracting money or gold or food), and for that it has to bring some sort of stable life environment and not be too greedy so people don't try to revolt.
Whether you get such through political negotiation before or after a war, or through a vote, or through a revolution, is the same as the end.
I would sooner die for my family and my country but I wouldn't lift a finger to save the lives of refugees/immigrants.
I'm more thinking about leaving asap.
The risk to feminism would be that this becomes so blatantly and obviously not true that no one can take it seriously. I don't think the continued draft of men would impact this because it's not a change to the status quo, and it isn't changing opinion in Ukraine.
A functioning "fourth estate" would have reported on this *before* the law was passed.
The ends don't justify the means. Conscription has no place in the free world. It's slavery, plain and simple. Going into the military should be an appealing career choice. Our soldiers are supposed to be highly skilled professionals, not cannon fodder in large quantities.
ps: There are 8 billion people on this planet, and I've never had any serious issues with any of them, much less a reason to start a war. Governments are always the cause of everyone's misery. Beware of yours!
And now the regime wants them to voluntarily sacrifice their lives for it.
It's not only moral and compatible with human rights in the free world, it's also far more effective.
I was looking in Google news for other reports about this, but only found an article from Berliner Zeitung published 5 hours after this article from Frankfurter Rundschau.
I am worried about what other information which could be important to me, the news did not report on.
As far as I understood the law the article from FR is correct: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wehrpflg/__3.html
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wehrpflg/__3.html
(3) Die Wehrpflicht endet mit Ablauf des Jahres, in dem der Wehrpflichtige das 45. Lebensjahr vollendet.
Women have no incentive to change that, and the small fraction of men powerful enough to change it can already exempt themselves from the meat grinder. The remaining men's opinions don't matter.
However, if I think through what this process would look like under modern living arrangements, what would happen? Intensified serial polygamy with a massive increase in single motherhood? Full on polygamy?
Our social structures aren’t really set up to handle that. It seems like it would be so bad for society that I wouldn’t really say men are “disposable” under the current arrangement. More like they are the roof and women are the foundation, maybe.
It’s better to lose your roof than your foundation, sure, but losing your roof is still really bad. It does not really compare to, say, throwing out a paper coffee cup.
Women's lives are valuable, men's are not. This has been the case across basically all societies in human history. Losing a ton of men really doesn't matter too much - especially young, family-less men.
Losing a lot of women, though, is really really bad.
Isn't that reinforcing a gender stereotype? I was told we were against that kind of things around here.
This isn't sexist, it's reality. It's the rationale for male conscription and male disposability.
The consequence is you violated the law, and they can have you at any time, even retroactively, for that.
That they don't is merely a detail. If it really has "no consequence" they should remove it.
I think it's clear that the interests of citizens and their state typically do not align. Unfortunately, most states have cultivated and propagated a different idea for decades, which is why so many people have a different perception of their state than the reality.
Instead, my 2c, should have changed it to a notice you have to send the military, at most.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's a story from 2002 about how the supreme court there upheld the legality of a military draft:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-11-mn-37321...
anyway, if you refused to be drafted and did not want to go to jail, you had to more-or-less stop using any government services, rent with roommates, avoid using a credit card etc. until you've reached some age, and then you could emerge again because the duty to serve expires at that certain (not very high) age. It was cuh-razy.
Also at that time only some people had to go to the draft, because they had not the capacity to take everyone. That made it likely easy for them to let go of suboptimal candidates.
The cold war has been over for a very long time. The whole process was reformed in 1984 by removing the mandatory oral hearing. Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995. That's not good enough (should be 100%), but not terrible either.
For example, I don't think it's in my interest to defend or die for the German state. However, I would use violence to protect my life if someone tried to kill me or threatened my life directly. The German state would interpret this as a political objection rather than a conscientious one, since I am willing to use violence in principle. If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.
> Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995.
Yes, as I said, after the Cold War, Germany no longer wanted to maintain such a large army, so they started accepting any reasonably well-written argument. But in any war, you can see that nation states will start struggling to recruit new soldiers as it becomes obvious to the population that it's a rather pointless endeavour to die for their state. So, they start forcing people. We've seen that in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, USA, etc.
That is a complete fantasy of yours. Political convictions are explicitly stated as a valid type of justification for conscientious objection by the Act on Conscientious Objection to Military Service. It even states the reasons do not have to be logical or objectively comprehensible, which easily covers your "I'm not opposed to all violence in all theoretically cases, but I fundamentally reject service for the German state".
That's one way to put it. The other would be 1 year of paid community service (which the alternative services ALWAYS were).
The famed German rule-following in action. This kind of routine violation of regulation is what led to Dieselgate. Social norms in places like this rarely support rule of law. There's a reason the EPA was the one which blew this wide open. Local regulators follow these norms because that's what German cultural norms are.
Article 20 Everyone is equal before the law.
Article 21 1. Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
Cynically speaking: the people making those laws probably don't want to be impacted by it. And Germany is effectively a gerontocracy.
CDU are losing popularity if we are to believe press, so that is one of the populist ways to boost some numbers for elections.
Oh and they've added a very political clause: the government can activate conscription WITHOUT a parliament vote. So most political parties who have voted in favor of conscription want to be able to claim "it wasn't us, it was Merz" (ie. CDU). In reality CSU and SPD have voted to effectively conscript German men between 18 and 45.
In other words, Germany expects to be in open war in a matter of months to years. Like every country before them they've decided young men are cheaper than actually investing in military equipment (they're investing in military equipment, but they just won't have it in that time period)
This probably means that if you can get out, get out, because it's not like being 46 years old will protect you from the impact of that, and yes it's not clear what the timing is going to be, and they're not being very forward about what the reason is for conscription.
So that's why 45. Because the existing conscription law (1954 + 2025) allows for conscripting every German male between 18 and 45.
But the US, for all its militarism, and all its military adventures, has not used the draft since Vietnam.
So I would say that Germany sees the need to be in a position where it can respond quickly if they need it. Well, given current events in their neighborhood, I can see their point. In fact, I would say that they are probably at least three years late in doing this.
Let's start with an easy one: Will Germany be ready (war is more than cheap bodies, after all, equipment, plans, ...)? No, they won't. They've never been ready before.
Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt.
What will Germany's reaction be to the European states that just don't help?
What will happen to world trade? The question is who will save it, because the historical answer was of course US.
>Will the US help? That was a given even just 1 year ago, but now is strongly in doubt. With the current commander in chief, the US will do nothing except talk a lot of nonsense contradicting itself daily.
>What will happen to world trade?. World trade as we know it is done. National security interests will force strategic industries to be on-shored. New trade deals will only be made with a short list of trustworthy allies.
If Russia does attack, the US will take 1+ years to ramp up and we will take a long time before we reach Europe in large numbers. The rapid reaction forces we have are not prepared for the new way of fighting we see in Ukraine.
Also the main reason russia is still slowly gaining land in Ukraine is because there are not enough people to man the frontline.
> (3) Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wehrpflg/__2.html
The quotes very much read to me like someone realizing what the change of Paragraph 2 means to Paragraph 3 means in real time and having to figure out what to answer to journalists.
I’m curious how that would work administratively though - would they require you to have that when trying to do Ausmeldung? And what about those who moved out before this law got changed?
Technically, do I need to go Bundeswehr office when I come back next time, to get the permission?
I _want_ to believe if this was a deliberate change that someone cared about; we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now because there would be clear answers to the very obvious questions here, but maybe my hope is misplaced.
The last time Germany had that much of a majority, it was under Bundeskanzler Kohl and Schroeder if I remember correctly. So like ~25 years ago.
Bundestag seats (from 2002 onwards):
2002 (15): https://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/html/pressemitteilungen1.ht...
2005 (16): https://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/html/presse_lwl_bw2005.html
2008 (17): https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/sitzverteilung17-2...
2013 (18): https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2013/sitzvert_...
2017 (19): https://www.bundestag.de/278118-278118
2020 (20): https://web.archive.org/web/20211102103524/https://www.bunde... (couldn't find an article on the Bundestag website, got deleted. Web archive version is a little broken)
2025 (21): https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/sitzverteilung
why only locals, but no migrants?
> (2) Männliche Personen haben nach Vollendung des 17. Lebensjahres eine Genehmigung des zuständigen Karrierecenters der Bundeswehr einzuholen, wenn sie die Bundesrepublik Deutschland länger als drei Monate verlassen wollen, ohne dass die Voraussetzungen des § 1 Absatz 2 bereits vorliegen. Das Gleiche gilt, wenn sie über einen genehmigten Zeitraum hinaus außerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland verbleiben wollen oder einen nicht genehmigungspflichtigen Aufenthalt außerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland über drei Monate ausdehnen wollen. Die Genehmigung ist für den Zeitraum zu erteilen, in dem die männliche Person für eine Einberufung zum Wehrdienst nicht heransteht. Über diesen Zeitraum hinaus ist sie zu erteilen, soweit die Versagung für die männliche Person eine besondere – im Bereitschafts-, Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall eine unzumutbare – Härte bedeuten würde; § 12 Absatz 6 ist entsprechend anzuwenden. Das Bundesministerium der Verteidigung kann Ausnahmen von der Genehmigungspflicht zulassen.
See: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wehrpflg/__3.html
This was not changed.
The article 3 of the Wehrpflichtgesetzes was previously only active in a war or close to war situation (Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall). Article 2 said this before:
> § 2 Geltung der folgenden Vorschriften
> Die §§ 3 bis 53 gelten im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
See: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/blob/master/w/wehrpflg/...
Now it says this:
> § 2 Anwendung dieses Gesetzes
> (1) Die nachfolgenden Vorschriften gelten nach Maßgabe der folgenden Absätze.
> (2) Die §§ 3 bis 52 gelten im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
> (3) Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45.
> (4) Die §§ 15a und 16 sind nur auf Betroffene anzuwenden, die nach dem 31. Dezember 2007 geboren sind. Satz 1 gilt nicht im Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall.
See: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wehrpflg/__2.html
This law changed it: https://www.recht.bund.de/bgbl/1/2025/370/VO
Is the a up to date git repository with all German law changes? The one I found was last updated 4 years ago.
First of all, there is no process yet for exactly requesting permission, secondly, the army already said they will not enforce the rule unless the Parliament declares combat readiness is necessary, and lastly, there is no punishment for not asking permission at this point in time.
And to be completely honest, if more people made use of registering for the damn ELEFAND emergency contact list, this rule wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
So, men are kind of responsible for this themselves by being lazy.
I had to help exfil Germans in Kabul when the US decided to pull out without telling all of their partners in time.
Everyone wanted to be rescued, but you have no idea how many German idiots travel to foreign countries, not even taking five minutes to let their own government know how to reach them and where they went in case of an emergency.
It’s super fun to drive around Kabul and pick up 55 years old complaining male Germans yelling at me because I told them I transport people, not their fucking luggage. Two even sued me afterwards for leaving their expensive camera equipment behind. A dozen complaints about my behavior.
Sometimes it’s really annoying to protect the average citizen. Luckily, I understand that it is an extreme situation for them. Just like some people sue nurses after they broke their ribs reviving their dead ass.
It’s a good thing all these idiots now have to ask for permission in the future and likely need to leave the data necessary so it’s known where they are, for how long and how to reach them.
A friend from the US sent the link to this thread to me, asking about it.
The source website has no ability to be switched to English language, so all information my friend got was from the headline, which without context was misleading for him. If it was clear people wouldn’t ask German-speaking friends to explain this to them, don’t you think?
And if we are really precise, right now German men don’t need to request permission, because there is neither a process nor any paperwork in place to request permission.
Without being able to see and understand the context, the headline on its own is misleading in my opinion.
Just do an experiment for yourself.
Take the original transcript from any trump speech during the Iran war and put it in a German translator. You will understand it’s about the Iran war but you will be surprised how insane those speeches sound if you are not able to understand English and rely on Google Translate to understand the context.
I trust humans. I don’t trust machines. You do you.
Thank you for the exchange and pointing out my inaccuracy. I will try to do better next time.
Have a good day and enjoy your Easter holidays if you’re Christian.
Previously this article 3 was only active in the "Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfall" which the Parliament has to declare. The law was extended with: "Außerhalb des Spannungs- oder Verteidigungsfalls gelten die §§ 3, 8a bis 20b, 25, 32 bis 35, 44 und 45." so this article is always active now.
For decades they have alienated their own native population, especially men. And now they want to conscript them as their approval ratings are around 15℅.
Think about it, Trump approval rating fell sharply but is still at about 40%. Merz is at 15% and most of those 15% are probably boomers in a nursing home. He is probably closer to 0% within the demographic he is trying to conscript.
The only war you're gonna get in Europe is a civil war.
In particular concerning the military conscription (laws), there exists a cross-generational opposition to these.
I just post two famous songs concerning this topic (if you know German):
Franz Josef Degenhardt - Befragung eines Kriegsdienstverweigerers [40 Interrogation of a conscientious objector] (1972)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDTtMTcj8X0
--
Reinhard Mey - Nein, meine Söhne geb' ich nicht (1986)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0qPsYTBCtQ
Reinhard Mey & Freunde [Reinhard Mey & friends] - Nein, meine Söhne geb' ich nicht [No, I won't give my sons] (new recording; 2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q-Ga3myTP4
See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nein,_meine_S%C3%B6hne_geb%E2%...
To be fair going against the demographic where you have a 0% approval rate does not lose you much.
Some countries may conscript non-citizens or allow them to serve voluntarily. Often because they are more likely to use the military as an extension of foreign policy rather than for defense. Others may see it a waste of effort, as those people are probably not sufficiently committed to the continued existence of the country.
I grew up in the Middle East and I can tell that cultural differences and values were more smooth and compatible than what I saw in Germany. Conscription requires a degree of trust in the people you give guns to and expect to fight on your side in case it is needed, that is mostly not true with immigrants in all times and all countries.
I don't know why immigration is brought up in this conversation at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626116
Edit: actually, we'll merge them hither instead of thither since current article is in English.
(We have deep respect for other languages, but HN has always been an English-language site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Energy is currently expensive because an orange maniac has started a war that only seems to benefit Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_and_sexism
It also turns out that men tend to be more in favor of war than women.
So whether codified in law or not, the power structure is already how you want it to be, and it's more likely to send men to their deaths.
There is absolutely nowhere in the West where this is true. Even the suggestion that a politician advocates for men's rights would be the end of their career, meanwhile they endlessly twerk for women's votes with all of the right campaign promises of cash and prizes. Some countries even now have ministers explicitly representing women.
The US 2024 election saw the election of a whole regime of very male chauvinistic types, and that’s being as neutral and charitable as I can be.
In the EU there’s a number of fairly far right parties with adjacent views polling well with a chance to win significant representation in future elections.
Asia is very heavily male led, probably more than the West. Same with the Middle East.
Around the world most state and corporate heads and high level bureaucrats are male.
There has been, in the West, a push for more female representation and it has made some headway but the world’s capitols and board rooms are still very much a sausage party.
But sure, continue to rail against equality and feminism for no reason.
He was about to drop truly groundbreaking theory, I assure you. No one has ever heard that bit before.
"We'll get around to it when some arbitrary measure is met, we promise"
This is the same thing you're criticising - using one injustice to justify another.
Everyone doesn't get drafted at once. It stands to reason that drafting women would mean fewer men were needed.
Otherwise everyone with good education will leave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War