A close associate of the army chief of staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, Krobatin was appointed Imperial and Royal Minister for War on 12 December 1912 and as an integral member of the "war party" gave his full backing to the hawkish element in the military in their calls for an immediate attack on Serbia following the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 and the July Ultimatum. With the outbreak of the First World War, Krobatin was responsible for the task of harnessing the economies of industrial Austria and agrarian Hungary to ensure the now mobilised military was supplied with vital arms and munitions as well as increasing industrial efficiency to meet the needs of a state with a large cohort of its industrial population no longer available for industrial and food production given their enlistment for war. According to a number of sources, Krobatin struggled in his task for the first two years of the war, and although he never really harnessed the economy efficiently, he succeeded in tripling the level of artillery available at divisional level.