He is calling for Germany's mandatory conscription to be maintained in the constitution but for it to be phased out in practice starting in mid-2011. Under the proposal, the army would shrink from its current size of 252,000 soldiers to around 165,000.
The German army can barely deploy their small force to Afghanistan with their current army. How can they even pretend to be a great power with the new numbers? I'm not sure why the Germans are even bothering to pay for a military at all. And conscription for 6 months is worthless, since a soldier takes that long to finish basic and school training.
Germany should scrap their military, save the $39 billion they spend, and just sign a $5 billion contract with Blackwater (or whatever their name is now) to protect Germany from foreign threats.
The Russians seriously worry that NATO is a threat to them?
UPDATE: Ah, the idea of military reform is to get rid of conscripts who can't be sent abroad anyway, and who aren't needed in numbers to make conscription lotteries fair to those eligible to be conscripted.
If this leads to more capable troops able to actually deploy to a fight, it makes sense to shrink their army rather than keep a make-work program for young people. It is always better to have a smaller number of troops capable of fighting than a larger number of troops that can't fight (but which you may believe can fight, getting you in the worst of both worlds).
So I retract my crack about the Germans implicit in the title.
