Terrorist conspiracies hatched within the armed forces point to a problem and possible threat militaries in every democratic country must handle prudently.

Back in 2017, a German army lieutenant in the Bundeswehr, Franco Albrecht, was arrested for creating a fake asylum-seeker identity in Germany. Albrecht’s larger objective was, as a refugee imposter with a government stipend and asylum-seeker housing, to carry out a terrorist plot in order to bring disrepute to refugees more generally, particularly Muslim populations from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. Are such conspiracies symptomatic of a larger phenomenon of military radicalization in the German armed forces, or was this an isolated incident?