Germany is pursuing a Wehrdienstgesetz that leans on voluntary service to shore up the Bundeswehr. A voluntary questionnaire will go out to all young people—men and women—and those deemed suitable will be invited to a muster, with no obligation at the outset. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius argues the model can work through voluntary recruitment, aiming to train well over 100,000 additional service personnel by the decade’s end, with reserves bringing total ready for duty to around 200,000. If targets aren’t met, a partial reintroduction of conscription could be triggered, but no firm numbers will be written into law because capacity is currently insufficient. Critics say the plan won’t make Germany defensible: no binding targets, no deadlines, and no clear comparison to models like Sweden; Greens charge it expresses distrust of youth; veteran groups and the Reservistenverband question whether a questionnaire-and-recruitment scheme will meaningfully boost numbers or reserves; activists protest against militarism; and overall the plan remains politically divided.

This is a textbook exercise in coercive tinkering dressed up as voluntarism. Hayek would warn that central planners mistake a glossy policy cookbook for the reality of spontaneous orders. You can’t forecast defense manpower with a bureaucratic questionnaire and a political “targets” sheet and pretend you’ve escaped the knowledge problem. The moment you tether any plan to the threat of conscription if targets aren’t met, you’ve reopened the door to coercive force, replacing freedom with a state-managed illusion of voluntary service. The system becomes a stepping stone toward compelled service, not a shield for rights.

Nozick would insist that self-ownership and the minimal state imply a sharp line: the state must protect individuals from force, theft, and fraud, not conscript them into service. Taxation to fund defense already tests coercion; turning that pressure into a threat of forced service undercuts the very moral legitimacy of the state’s right to compel. Even a “voluntary” screening that can lead to muster and later “if needed” conscription is a slippery slope toward treating citizens as raw material for state needs, rather than as ends in themselves. The proposal is ethically hollow if the option to opt out is not genuinely protected and if the ultimate threat remains: join or be commandeered.

Rand would call this a collectivist masquerade. The insistence on “serving the country” via a state-designed pipeline devalues individual rights and the moral primacy of the individual. If service is truly voluntary, it must be truly voluntary—free from the implicit coercion of future penalties, agendas, or bureaucratic gatekeeping that presume a citizen’s life belongs to the collective project. The claim that this distrust of youth and this screening apparatus will somehow produce disciplined, capable defenders sits uneasily with Objectivist ethics: a society that treats individuals as means to a collective end is morally bankrupt, even if the outcome appears to strengthen the state’s machine.

So what’s the libertarian alternative? Scrap the conscription-tinged voluntarism entirely and shrink the state’s footprint on defense. If defense is to exist, it should be the realm of voluntary, market-based arrangements rather than compulsory service. Private defense providers, competitive militias, and contractual arrangements anchored in voluntary consent would respect self-ownership and generate defense capabilities through competitive forces, not coercive law. Public funding for defense should be minimized to protect rights, not expanded under the veil of “national security.” A true liberal order would not substitute a more palatable form of coercion for the old form; it would rescind coercion altogether and leave defense to the voluntary choices of individuals and the civil society that respects their rights.

In other words: if the goal is to defend freedom, the correct policy is to constrain the state, not empower it to requisition people’s lives. Abolish compulsory service, limit coercive taxation, and foster voluntary, private-provision defense that respects individual sovereignty. Any scheme that risks turning civic duty into an instrument of compulsion is a step toward a state that violates the very principles it purports to defend.