What has changed in the defence industry since 2014 – and what has stubbornly stayed the same.
A new website is a good moment to pause. While clearing up for this relaunch, I came across a piece I wrote in January 2014 for an industry newsletter: “Quo vadis Wehrtechnik?” – where is defence technology heading? I re-read it with mixed feelings. Some of it has become unintentionally funny. Other parts I could publish again today word for word. Both say something about this industry – and about why we have done nothing else since 2011.
January 2014: cutting, shrinking, looking abroad
The starting point back then, in my own words (translated from the German original):
“The defence technology industry is in a period of massive upheaval. […] Smaller budgets, a marked decline in publicly funded research and development projects, increasing internationalisation of markets and changing threat scenarios for the armed forces.”
And further:
“Home markets will certainly remain attractive for the Western European defence industry. The industry’s real growth, however, is taking place outside these markets – above all in the Middle East, South America and Asia.”
The headlines I quoted at the time read “How much defence does Europe need?” and “Can Germany afford to weaken its defence industry?”. The debate was whether the country wanted to afford the industry at all. The controversy of the 2013/14 New Year was the German Armed Forces Association’s call for armed drones to protect soldiers.
And then this sentence, which I would no longer write that way today:
“The technological and know-how lead of the Western European defence industry over countries such as Russia, South Korea, China, Brazil, India or Turkey will probably persist for years to come.”
Russia appeared in a list of laggards. So did Turkey. Today South Korea delivers tanks and howitzers to Poland, Turkish drones have helped decide wars, and Russia needs no further explanation.
2024: the “Zeitenwende” and the hole
Ten years later, in spring 2024, the situation was a different one – and yet my analysis sounded similar, only with a different subject. This time it was about the Bundeswehr itself:
“It has long been time for us to address the ‘personnel gap’ in public debate as well – a gap which is not a gap at all, but an ever-widening hole that threatens the Bundeswehr’s capabilities.”
The special fund had been approved and was already foreseeably exhausted, the conscription debate was back, the target strength of 198,000 soldiers had been missed for years. The armed forces were spending around 35 million euros a year on recruitment advertising – and shrinking nonetheless. I wrote at the time of a “garish bouquet of campaigns” and asked whether a single rose might not make more sense.
2026: everything is different
Today Germany is allocating roughly 108 billion euros to defence, the debt brake has been eased for that purpose, NATO is discussing five per cent of GDP, and the Federal Chancellor has declared the strongest conventional army in Europe as the goal. Nobody asks the 2014 question – “Can Germany afford to weaken its defence industry?” – any more. Growth is no longer happening in the Middle East but in Unterlüß, Kassel, Munich and Kiel. Wolfsburg would like to be part of it too, but unfortunately seems to be busy abolishing itself. Drones are no longer a controversy; they are going into series production. Defence start-ups, which simply did not exist in this industry in 2014, are closing funding rounds nobody would have thought possible back then.
The attractiveness of defence companies as employers has even become media-friendly: senior managers from the automotive world are polishing their CVs and applying, and in many places picks and shovels are being sold to the gold diggers.
The figures are public. Rheinmetall received 350,000 applications last year, 250,000 of them from Germany. By 2030 the German defence industry needs 55,000 to 75,000 additional people, around 30,000 positions are open today, and the number of job postings rose by a further 22 per cent in the first half of 2026.
Lay the three texts side by side and you see: the market has not changed, it has inverted.
And what has stayed the same
Now the paragraph from January 2014 that I could publish unchanged today:
“In our experience, many companies in the defence industry are not yet prepared – above all in the area of personnel – for the changes needed to increase competitiveness. The decisive challenge will, to an ever greater extent, be the targeted search for and recruitment of the ‘right’ people.”
Back then the problem was: too few orders, and still the right people were missing. Today the problem is: too many orders, and the same people are missing. The bottleneck has remained the same; only the direction of the wind has turned – and it is blowing considerably harder.
It is worth taking a second look at the figures above. A market in which a single company receives 350,000 applications and 30,000 positions still remain open does not have a volume problem. We call it a skills shortage anyway. That is convenient – a shortage is a circumstance nobody can be blamed for. What we actually encounter in our conversations with companies and candidates are three other things: reach – applications arrive where the name is known; the mid-sized supplier in the same supply chain does not get them. Time – months pass between first interview and signature, and whoever hears nothing in that time takes silence for disinterest and leaves. Fit – from 350,000 applications a selection is made that hardly anyone on either side can follow. None of these problems is solved by more people applying. We are expanding recruitment marketing where we should be repairing processes. In 2024 I held this up to the Bundeswehr. In 2026 it applies to the industry.
The recommendation of 2014 has held as well: job advertisements are not enough; what is needed is the discreet direct approach to people who are not looking at all. What was a method for difficult cases in 2014 is the norm in 2026. What has been added: profiles have become broader (procurement law and agile development, security classification and dual-use business model in the same head), security clearances take longer, and the industry has learnt to poach the few suitable people from one another. The cannibalism I described in February this year was not a danger in 2014. Back then there was too little to cannibalise.
Cyber, by the way, featured in my 2014 text as a scenario “moving further into the foreground”. In April 2026 we had to note in our Talent Radar that cyber and critical infrastructure are falling short of expectations. Some futures take their time.
Quo vadis – the open question
I gave no answer to the question in the title in 2014, and I give none today. What I can say: in twelve years this industry has experienced every market condition there is – austerity, stagnation, Zeitenwende, build-up. Almost everything has changed. What has not changed is that, in the end, people decide whether budgets turn into capabilities. Finding those people was hard in 2014. Today it is harder. Where the industry is heading will not be decided in budget plans but in boardrooms – by who sits there in five years’ time.
We will keep watching. Personally, confidentially and with an eye for fit – not for algorithms.
Talk to us. connect@focus-defence.de · +49 30 5444 5899
Sources: 350,000 applications – Rheinmetall, dpa, 24 April 2026. Staffing need of 55,000 to 75,000 by 2030 and around 30,000 open positions – ESUT, 17 November 2025. Plus 22 per cent job postings in the first half of 2026 – index Research, 26 August 2026.