[Satire] | Kraft, Power, Strength: A Cheaper Way to Scare Russia

Germany is on course to spend more than €650 billion on defence between 2025 and 2029. There may be a more affordable way to produce the same desired psychological effect.

Germany has a defence problem, although at this point it may be more accurate to say that Germany has acquired an extremely expensive solution to a defence problem. The numbers have become almost difficult to process: Germany spent roughly €86 billion through the regular defence budget and Bundeswehr special fund in 2025. The corresponding total rises to around €108 billion in 2026 and €140 billion in 2027, before the regular defence budget alone reaches roughly €154 billion in 2028 and €163 billion in 2029. Across those five years, the total comes to more than €650 billion.

This is, by any normal standard, an astonishing amount of money. It becomes even more astonishing if you are in your twenties and can reasonably assume that you will encounter the fiscal consequences of it for quite some time, whether through even more taxes, debt service, reduced spending elsewhere or future governments inventing increasingly elegant synonyms for debt.

There are, obviously, good reasons for Germany to spend more on defence. Russia has made military threats in Europe considerably less theoretical than they seemed fifteen years ago. NATO deterrence requires more than statements of concern. The Bundeswehr has also been underfunded for long enough that some degree of expensive catching-up was probably inevitable. Still, the sheer scale of the bill raises an interesting question: what exactly are we buying?

Part of the answer is straightforward military capability. Tanks, ammunition, aircraft, air defence, logistics, personnel, infrastructure. But another part is less tangible. Germany is also paying to signal that attacking NATO would be an exceptionally bad idea. In other words, a sizeable share of modern defence spending ultimately serves the ancient purpose of making the other guy nervous. But intimidation, unlike a Leopard 2, does not necessarily have to cost Leopard 2 money.

As luck would have it, Germany happens to possess an under-utilised strategic asset in this field already: Jeremy Fragrance. For anyone outside the relevant corner of the internet, Jeremy Fragrance is Germany’s most internationally successful perfume influencer, a man associated with immaculate white suits, extraordinary personal conviction and the motivational trinity of:

KRAFT!

POWER!

STRENGTH!

So far, these capabilities have mainly been deployed in fragrance reviews, motivational TikToks and whatever category of human activity requires a man in a white suit to suddenly begin doing one armed push-ups. However, this seems unnecessarily narrow.

Germany should therefore establish a new Fragrance Deterrence Doctrine, or FDD, based around one million low-cost humanoid replicas of Jeremy Fragrance. Their official designation would be Jeremy Fragrance Klone, conveniently abbreviated JFK. The appeal of the JFK is that it avoids one of the easiest ways to make humanoid robotics unnecessarily expensive: giving every unit capabilities it will never need.

A border Jeremy has a remarkably narrow job description. He has to remain upright in bad weather, maintain the white suit, synchronize with the rest of the formation and deliver KRAFT! POWER! STRENGTH! at the appropriate moment. There is little reason to equip one million units with advanced language models, autonomous planning or sophisticated decision-making when most of them will spend their careers facing east and shouting. For once, limited functionality is a procurement advantage.

At an extremely optimistic Chinese bulk-manufacturing cost of €1,000 per unit, an entire one million-Jeremy force would come in at €1 billion. Let us weatherproof the chassis, add industrial speakers, batteries, solar panels, basic synchronization hardware and enough structural reinforcement to survive several Brandenburg winters and even at €5,000 to €8,000 per unit, the complete system would cost somewhere between €5 billion and €8 billion.

Even the pessimistic version consumes barely more than one percent of the overall defence trajectory. The remaining money could be returned to taxpayers or placed into a sovereign wealth fund whose sole purpose is compensating Germans under 30 for having experienced the 2020s so far.

The Fragrance Deterrence Doctrine would work in several overlapping layers, beginning with the most obvious: sound. A million JFK units would stand in formation facing east. At predetermined intervals, the entire line would deliver the motivational sequence in perfect synchronization.

KRAFT! POWER! STRENGTH!

The important word here is synchronization. One Jeremy shouting at you is content. One million Jeremys shouting at you is psychological warfare.

From the air, the formation would appear as a continuous white line across Germany’s eastern approaches. From the ground, approaching forces would encounter an apparently endless row of identical perfume influencers screaming motivational Denglish toward them at industrial volume. There likely is no established military doctrine for this - and that is part of the advantage.

Conventional forces are fairly legible. Tanks suggest armour. Artillery suggests artillery. Fighter aircraft suggest air power. An uninterrupted chain of white-suited Jeremys raises a much less comfortable set of questions: 

Why Jeremy Fragrance?

Why are there so many?

Are they autonomous?

What happens after “Strength”?

Is there another word?

At a minimum, somebody in Moscow would have to schedule a meeting about it.

Figure 1. Proposed JFK deployment along Germany’s eastern frontier. One million white-suited units provide a continuous visible deterrent while synchronized acoustic emissions project KRAFT! POWER! STRENGTH! eastward.

There is also a genuine historical precedent for treating cross-border sound as something more than an annoyance. South Korea has repeatedly used giant loudspeaker systems along the Demilitarized Zone to broadcast news, political messages and K-pop into North Korea. After Seoul resumed broadcasts in 2024, some were reportedly audible more than twenty kilometres into North Korean territory. Pyongyang has historically reacted with remarkable hostility to the speakers, and earlier disputes over them have even contributed to exchanges of fire. South Korea suspended the broadcasts in June 2025 and later began dismantling the installations as part of an effort to reduce tensions.

The takeaway for Germany is hard to ignore. States can become surprisingly upset when their neighbours point very large speakers at them. South Korea has therefore already supplied the doctrinal ancestor. Germany merely needs to adapt the concept to local conditions. Less K-pop. More Jeremy.

The second layer is optical. Every JFK must wear white, since camouflage would ruin the entire concept. The point is not to hide the formation. The point is for satellite imagery to reveal a brilliant white line stretching across the landscape and for analysts to realise, with increasing discomfort as they zoom in, that every individual pixel appears to be the exact same man.

One million white suits in direct sunlight would also create a useful degree of visual unpleasantness. The exact optical properties should obviously be left to experts, but “aggressively reflective menswear” is an area in which German defence doctrine remains underdeveloped. The result is part military formation, part art installation, part diffuse flashbang.

NATO has traditionally signalled readiness through exercises, deployments and communiqués. The Fragrance Deterrence Doctrine would communicate roughly the same emotional message through an uninterrupted horizon of white lapels.

Then come the perfume tester strips. Anyone familiar with Jeremy’s videos will recognise the little paper strips used to test fragrances. A JFK without them would lack cultural authenticity, so each unit receives a supply. 

During periods of heightened readiness, the formation could release enormous quantities of these strips into the air, creating a fluttering white cloud above the defensive line. Cameras see clutter, human observers see confusion, and any cheap drone trying to navigate through the area at least has to contend with the fact that German airspace has somehow turned into the fragrance department at Douglas.

At minimum, the strips provide visual nuisance, confusion and a satisfying degree of doctrinal coherence. If the Bundeswehr later discovers a way to give them additional defensive utility without turning this article into an actual weapons manual, wonderful. Germany still has about €642 billion left.

Figure 2. Concept rendering of the JFK soft-kill air-defence layer. Mass-dispersed perfume tester strips create visual clutter around incoming low-cost drones, turning the airspace into what defence planners might describe as an aggressively overstocked fragrance counter.

The most important layer, however, may simply be the formation itself. Deterrence depends partly on predictability. States observe one another, estimate likely responses and build assumptions about what the other side considers rational. The Jeremy Wall introduces a small but potentially valuable crack into that process. You prepare for German armour and find a million perfume influencers. You expect a NATO exercise and instead receive synchronized motivational shouting. You task a satellite over Central Europe at 04:00 and discover that every unit has begun doing calisthenics. At 04:03, the fragrance review starts.

The opponent is now dealing with a country whose escalation ladder apparently contains categories they had not previously modelled. Several force multipliers follow naturally from the basic doctrine. JFK formations could incorporate Prussian drill movements, producing the rare spectacle of something that looks simultaneously like 1914 and TikTok. Every tenth unit could carry an atomizer for ceremonial scent operations, with fragrances rotated seasonally by the newly established Federal Ministry of Fragrance Affairs.

The whole formation should also be livestreamed around the clock. A “The Jeremy Wall” YouTube channel would provide public transparency, strategic messaging and, crucially, advertising revenue. This may be the first defence procurement project in German history with a plausible path toward monetisation and actual return on investment.

A smaller mobile formation, the Jeremy Rapid Reaction Force, could be kept in reserve for emergencies. Early concepts involve e-scooters. Further details remain classified. The real Jeremy Fragrance, meanwhile, should never be placed into the regular chain of command. His strategic value is too high. He would serve in a ceremonial capacity, somewhat closer to a nuclear football, a regimental mascot and the pope combined. 

The inaugural activation practically writes itself. The Chancellor, Defence Minister and NATO Secretary General gather at the completed eastern sector. Cameras from across the world are present. Jeremy approaches a large red button.

There is a countdown. Poland watches. Russia watches. Financial markets briefly stop what they are doing. Jeremy presses the button. One million heads rise. For perhaps two seconds, nothing happens. Then the entire eastern frontier erupts:

KRAFT!

POWER!

STRENGTH!

Somewhere in Moscow, an analyst quietly deletes the previous version of the Germany file. Critics will point out that a million humanoid perfume influencers cannot replace modern air defence, artillery, logistics, ammunition stockpiles, cyber capability, hardened infrastructure, trained personnel and functioning alliances. This is correct, which is why I would recommend keeping some of those things.

The more interesting question is whether European defence policy has become so accustomed to discussing deterrence in increments of tens of billions that we have neglected cheaper ways of projecting menace. For €5 billion to €8 billion, the Fragrance Deterrence Doctrine offers persistent border presence, acoustic intimidation, optical dominance, meme supremacy, national branding, renewable-energy integration and an advertising-supported livestream.

The current alternative costs more than €650 billion and has considerably worse merch potential. And, remarkably, the Jeremy Wall would already outperform current German Russia policy in at least one domain: communication.

Germany can apparently mobilise more than €650 billion for rearmament, while serious diplomacy with Russia increasingly feels like an exotic side project. The JFK line fixes this immediately. Every few hours, one million German representatives turn east and deliver three clear words across the border.

KRAFT! POWER! STRENGTH!

That is already three more words aimed at Russia than German diplomacy seems capable of producing much of the time. Perhaps the generation being asked to finance this enormous project can therefore be forgiven for proposing a cheaper defence strategy. At least ours talks to the enemy.