BRUSSELS, June 5. /TASS/. The Bundeswehr will need to expand by 50,000 to 60,000 troops to comply with the latest NATO defense capacity requirements, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said upon arriving at a NATO Defense Ministers’ meeting in Brussels.

"We suppose - and that’s just a rough estimate - that we will need around 50,000 to 60,000 more soldiers in our standing army than we have today," the German defense chief said in response to a reporter’s question.

While military service will so far continue to be non-mandatory, "voluntary participation can go beyond this threshold if we can be attractive as an employer and if we recruit more people, young men and women, who will say: `I am ready to devote myself to work for a longer period’. That’s the goal," Pistorius added.

Also, the target package for Germany, or contribution to the North Atlantic Alliance, will be second-largest at NATO, Pistorius revealed. "I will not elaborate for one simple reason: I would not like potential aggressors to see my cards," he explained. The minister answered in the affirmative to a question of whether Germany would manufacture drones and train Bundeswehr personnel to use those. Commenting on supplies of Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine, he said there had not been any changes to this.

There are currently around 183,000 personnel in the Bundeswehr. The German army is undermanned amid low attractiveness of the military service. Germany abolished compulsory military conscription in July 2011 after which it transitioned to a professional army.