Every year around 6.5 million people travel to Munich for Oktoberfest. Bavaria’s capital is known for its beer, pretzels, lederhosen, and Bayern Munich, Germany’s most decorated football club. But for the past few years, Munich has had another distinguishing feature. Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, one of Europe’s most dynamic hubs for defense-sector companies has taken shape around the city in southern Germany.
\nAround one-sixth of the companies belonging to the BDSV, Germany’s defense industry association, come from the greater Munich area. Alongside long-established major arms manufacturers \u2014 such as Airbus Defence and Space, MTU Aero Engines, radio-equipment maker Rohde & Schwarz, or electronics manufacturer Hensoldt \u2014 an increasing number of defense-sector start-ups now run their operations out of Munich or its surroundings. In Germany’s federal system, the individual L\u00e4nder compete with one another to attract as much defense funding as possible to their own regions. While the automotive sector and other industries are struggling, Germany’s growing defense budget promises fresh investment in armaments. The federal defense budget alone is expected to reach around 153 billion euros by 2029, with an upward trend. North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg, Lower Saxony, Berlin \u2014 all of them want a share of the billions earmarked for weapons, but a substantial portion is being invested in Munich.
\nSo how did Munich pull this off? The ecosystem that allows new companies to spring up in the Bavarian capital is one of a kind. Alongside the Bundeswehr University, many graduates of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) find their way into the defense industry. TUM actively encourages this path: in February it founded the “TUM Security and Defense Alliance,” designed to institutionalize partnerships with defense companies in the Munich area. Munich’s universities have given rise to the country’s most successful defense start-ups: the drone start-up Quantum Systems was founded by Florian Seibel, a former Bundeswehr officer who graduated from the Bundeswehr University in Munich; Marc Wietfeld, co-founder of Arx Robotics, trained there as well \u2014 his company’s ground drones are being used in Ukraine. The list of Munich defense start-ups could go on for a while. TUM Venture Labs, a joint initiative of TUM Munich and the business-incubation center UnternehmerTUM, has been supporting defense-sector start-ups since 2023, from founding through market entry. In Erding, just outside Munich, the Bundeswehr has set up an innovation center aimed at strengthening cooperation between the armed forces and start-ups.
\nBavaria has always fiercely defended its own interests within Germany. State premier Markus S\u00f6der, of the Christian Social Union (CSU) \u2014 the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU \u2014 has a notable knack for drawing industry to Bavaria. And he has made defense policy one of his strong suits. Just recently, at the end of July, S\u00f6der traveled to Aschau am Inn, about an hour’s drive from Munich, for the groundbreaking ceremony of an expansion to a Rheinmetall plant, set to become Europe’s largest gunpowder factory.
\nIn April, the Bavarian state government passed a specific “law for promoting the defense industry in Bavaria,” which allows defense-sector companies to build facilities faster and obtain permits more quickly. Bavaria is the first German Land to grant special conditions of this kind to the arms industry by law \u2014 even though defense matters are normally regulated at the federal level. Defense start-up Helsing has said that this law also factored into its choice of location for one of its facilities. And in 2024, the Bavarian regional government had approved an amendment to the higher-education law that would have required universities to cooperate with the Bundeswehr wherever necessary for national security. The law was partly struck down by the Bavarian Constitutional Court, but it remains telling of the importance the regional government places on the defense industry.
\nAfter the last federal elections, rumors circulated that the CSU had its eye on the defense ministry in the new government, even though this actually seemed like an unlikely prospect in a coalition between conservatives and the SPD, given that the current defense minister, Boris Pistorius, has in recent years been the most popular politician in the country. But for the CSU, it was probably also a matter of representing the interests of Bavaria’s defense sector.
\nThe Munich Security Conference, born in the 1960s as the “Internationale Wehrkunde-Begegnung,” draws large swaths of world politics. It was there, in 2024, that Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, learned of her husband’s death; in 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gave an ideological, polemical speech there on the supposed threat posed by political elites to European values; this year, Chancellor Merz and the French president sought common ground there with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The conference is also an occasion for industry figures to meet informally with top political leaders. And here too, Bavarian industrialists enjoy a small advantage of proximity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every year around 6.5 million people travel to Munich for Oktoberfest. Bavaria’s capital is known for its beer, pretzels, lederhosen, and Bayern Munich, Germany’s most decorated football club. But for the past few years, Munich has had another distinguishing feature. Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, one of Europe’s most dynamic hubs for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":13,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7918"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7951,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7918\/revisions\/7951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}