As of: February 24, 2024, 5:31 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
Comments
Press
Split
Too little of everything and everything too late: the opposition and entrepreneurs are attacking the defense minister and complaining about the lack of efficiency.
Berlin – Armin Papperger thinks the Defense Minister is great: “Pistorius can shake hands.
And his mindset is right.
When he says 'We'll do it', we believe it too - trust is crucial when you want to invest.
It would have previously taken the ministry ten years just to complete the contracts worth billions of euros that we concluded with the federal government last year.
This will be done in a few months today.
The team of Pistorius and the procurement office are doing a great job!” The CEO of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall enthused about this to the
Tagesspiegel
.
Hermann Mayer can only shake his head at this statement.
Mayer is managing director of Metallwerke Elisenhütte Nassau (MEN Defensetec) in Nassau an der Lahn;
He has now complained bitterly to
Südwestrundfunk
: about the Defense Minister and about the fact that the Bundeswehr's orders for ammunition are bureaucratic and unreliable.
Mayer: "The 'turning point' has not yet reached us." The company boss fears for his existence: "What we are massively lacking is planning security through multi-year orders," criticizes Mayer in an interview with
SWR
.
For example, his company produces ammunition for the armed forces and police of various countries.
Sweden, France and Holland have ordered for at least one, if not two years, says Mayer - he is still waiting for orders from the Bundeswehr.
He accuses Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) of saying that the Bundeswehr is still lagging behind the needs and has not yet adapted its procurement modalities to reality.
In his opinion, it is not the Bundeswehr Procurement Office in Koblenz that is responsible, but rather the Ministry of Defense directly.
The accusation was rejected there.
The ministry cannot comment on statements made by individual companies in the defense industry, writes
SWR
about the response from Berlin.
Neitzel: “The Bundeswehr was already at its last whistle in 2001”
At the beginning of the Ukraine war in February 2022, the German military historian Sönke Neitzel also criticized the procurement office and the Ministry of Defense: “The Bundeswehr has a dysfunctional structure, and if you don't approach it, the turning point will not happen,” he said
on
ZDF
the talk show “Markus Lanz”.
The military historian from the University of Potsdam spoke plainly: “The Bundeswehr was already on its last legs in 2001,” he said.
For decades it was basically not about arms procurement for the Bundeswehr.
“If you have a Bundeswehr that doesn’t have to fight, it can also be used in peacekeeping missions in Mali or Afghanistan.
She didn’t have to really fight with tanks and planes.”
Ammunition for a long-term conflict: A huge challenge for the Bundeswehr, supplies are lagging behind demand - for structural reasons in politics and the military.
Boris Pistorius (SPD) is required.
© Alexei Konovalov/imago/Michael Fischer/dpa/Montage
Eva Högl (SPD) believes this is a legacy of the government under Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU): It was only with the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 that the federal government woke up and once again focused on alliance and national defense.
But nothing really happened after that, said the Armed Forces Commissioner of the German Bundestag on
ZDF
.
Angela Merkel always moderated it, Neitzel added, and the SPD blocked everything.
However, these difficulties in the ministry are ages old, as
Deutschlandfunk
reported in 2014: “The need for coordination in the Ministry of Defense has also hindered efficient decisions so far.
The armaments project and budget situation must be harmonized in the ministry.
The budget department monitors progress with the view that the funds earmarked for a calendar year actually flow out.
At the end of the year, any unspent funds will be returned to the Finance Minister.”
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In January 2023, Boris Pistorius took office as Defense Minister with the aim of equipping the Bundeswehr faster, cheaper and more practicably.
“We will no longer be able to stop ongoing projects unless they fail,” the SPD politician told the
Tagesschau
at the time.
Other projects should therefore continue, “because we are working within the framework of contracts,” as he said.
But “from now on” there will be an end to “golden edge solutions” for the procurement of projects and especially their planning, emphasized the Defense Minister.
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Entrepreneur Mayer's shot seems to be on point.
Der
Spiegel
is currently seconding: Defense Minister Pistorius has made the procurement of bullets a top priority.
But the ammunition offensive is stalling.
“The ministry is not spending as much money on this as it could.” The news magazine is based on a request from CDU Bundestag member Ingo Gädechens from the Ostholstein-Storman Nord constituency;
He is a CDU defense expert and a member of the Bundestag's budget committee.
The Ministry of Defense replied that around 845 million euros had gone into the procurement of ammunition;
and therefore around 280 million euros less than the ministry had budgeted.
According to Gädechens, the federal government even spent around 40 million euros less on ammunition last year than in 2022, excluding advance payments for outstanding goods and annual inflation.
Spiegel
: “The ministry says that there has been a 'reversal in the trend' in ammunition procurement over the past two years.
In 2024, ammunition for around 3.5 billion euros is expected to be purchased.” According to Ingo Gädechens, the federal government will still miss its procurement targets for Bundeswehr armaments in the second year after the turn of the century.
According to him, the money available has not been fully used for any of the procurement titles.
Lindner: The Bundeswehr must be trained using the regular budget
The German political scientist Carlo Masala supports Neitzel's thesis, as he writes in his current book "Conditionally ready for defense": "After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the control mania of the Ministry of Defense took on new dimensions, and in both the civilian and military complex of the Bundeswehr there has since been a "We created a system that essentially made this army unfit for action and unfit for war - and the Bundeswehr still suffers from this system today: from over-bureaucratization, lengthy decision-making processes and organized irresponsibility."
The distribution battles over the federal budget are becoming a second battlefield, as Maybrit Illner's panel discussion on
ZDF
recently showed.
Party leader Ricarda Lang (Alliance 90/The Greens) vehemently called for foreign policy not to be played off against the domestic security situation: Retrofitting is important, but should not be financed at the expense of social services, so the Bundeswehr should primarily be serviced from new debts - a view that which Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) vehemently rejects: Because upgrading the Bundeswehr is an existential question, but a structural task that will probably last for decades, it has to be done through regular state finances.
Plain text: No more mortgages.
Wüst: The arms industry urgently needs planning security
“The federal government will have to spend between 20 and 40 billion euros to bring the ammunition stocks up to the standard agreed in NATO,” says Hans-Werner Bartels (SPD) in a current Westdeutscher
Rundfunk
documentary .
Between 2015 and 2020, Bartels was the military commissioner, i.e. the “lawyer” for the troops appointed by the federal government.
Bartels puts the current duration of the Bundeswehr's defense capability at a maximum of two days.
The target number of personnel totaling 203,000 soldiers - including up to 12,500 voluntary military service and 4,500 positions for reservists - should remain unchanged.
Currently, however, the number of personnel is only around 184,000 active soldiers and up to 5,500 reservists.
For Colonel André Wüstner, the chairman of the German Armed Forces Association, a country's defense capability depends on three things: the operational Bundeswehr, an efficient arms industry and social resilience - which historian Sönke Neitzel already stated two years before the outbreak of the Ukraine war in his book " German Warriors” had sketched.
He accused the government and parliament of dishonesty and encouraged the military to “think more in terms of war,” as he wrote.
The author noted “dissonances” between the “warriors” deployed abroad and politics and civil society: The citizen in uniform is the model of the Bundeswehr's internal leadership, but fell out of focus due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent lack of an enemy Focus.
The Bundeswehr had ceased to exist in social discourse.
People in uniform were considered unseemly in the cityscape.
“Nothing has changed in the Federal Republic’s structural pacifism in recent years,” writes Neitzel.
His conclusion: “The Bundeswehr’s financial resources are inadequate and the road to a “full-fledged army” capable of military action is still a long way off.
In addition, civil society is not taking part: Where financial resources are limited, spending must be followed by savings elsewhere.” Dealing with the arms industry also requires a “mental turnaround,” said Army Colonel André Wüstner.
The current problems cannot be attributed to the procurement office, but are due to the capacities of the defense industry.
The chairman of the German Armed Forces Association demands clearly: “The defense industry must be given planning security through commitments and framework agreements.”