New anger flares up at the Puma: The opposition criticizes the tank's fire extinguishers as dangerous; and the combat value also lags behind expectations.
Berlin – Two words accompany the Puma, which, according to the manufacturer, is the “most modern armored personnel carrier in the world”: the words “again” and “problems” – that runs through the years. Now
Bild
is reporting further delays – in this case improvements. The fiasco has now lasted over a quarter of a century. There are even arguments about equipping people with hand fire extinguishers. It appears to be miles away from being able to combat an attack by Vladimir Putin's troops.
Rheinmetall was supposed to hand over 15 Puma to the Bundeswehr in equipment level S1 by December. In mid-March, the Defense Ministry reported delays to Parliament. The ministry is said to have promised MPs that the arms company would now have to pay a contractual penalty for the delay, claims Bild
am Sonntag
- but this has so far remained unconfirmed. One thing is certain: many of the Puma armored personnel carriers to be retrofitted arrive later than planned. The arms company Rheinmetall, which is part of the manufacturer consortium, was originally supposed to have delivered by December last year. Boris Pistorius' (SPD) ministry admitted to
BamS
that it had only accepted ten Puma S1s from the industry so far.
Puma retrofitting: The hub of the “Infantryman System of the Future”
The new Puma version S1 is intended to gain combat power through the integration of long-range weapons such as the multi-role light guided missile system (MELLS) and through additional sensors such as the new all-round and driver's vision system, which is said to mean the end of the angle mirror era. For the first time, the entire crew will be able to see through the armor both day and night. Fusion mode combines daytime visibility with powerful thermal imaging, enabling early detection of camouflaged targets regardless of the weather or time. The Puma is the first Western combat vehicle that will roll onto the battlefield with such a system as standard.
Another feature of the Puma S1 is that it is prepared to accommodate the turret-independent secondary weapon system (TSWA) on the right rear of the vehicle. The unmanned weapon station TSWA will later be used for self-protection and can fire various 40 mm projectiles up to 400 meters away. In addition, equipping the vehicle with modern digital communication means is intended to upgrade the vehicle to become a hub with the associated grenadiers - with the connection of the armored personnel carrier and the “Infantryman System of the Future” the “Panzer Grenadier System” is created. The infantrymen are digitally connected to each other, to the combat vehicle and other armored personnel carriers in their unit, writes the
Bundeswehr
.
Puma retrofitting: Bundeswehr wants to be operational by 2029
The upgrade project is almost two years old.
Soldier & Technology
reported in June 2021: “Part of the Bundeswehr’s Puma infantry fighting vehicle fleet will be retrofitted to configuration level S1; this was recently contractually agreed between the Bundeswehr and the industry involved. After the budget funds were approved by parliament, the Federal Office for Equipment, Information Technology and Use of the Bundeswehr in Koblenz (BAAINBw) agreed on June 28, 2021 with PSM GmbH, the 50:50 joint venture between Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann Contract to convert the first batch of 154 infantry fighting vehicles (AFVs) worth one billion euros concluded.” This measure was scheduled to be completed at the end of 2026.
“If we are really preparing for a conflict, we have to gear everything towards operational readiness. And the environmentally friendly fire extinguisher in the Puma shows the exact opposite: in the event of a fire, the fire is extinguished, but the tank is unable to fight. This can’t be serious!”
CDU defense expert Ingo Gädechens told BamS
The second lot, i.e. the second tranche, was called up in April 2023. The financing comes from the Bundeswehr special fund and includes options for the conversion of a further 143 Puma worth 820 million euros; If implemented on time, these tanks would be available to the troops in 2029 - according to
Soldier & Technology
, this would determine the extent to which the Army can successfully implement its “Heer Plan”. A total of 266 combat-ready Puma infantry fighting vehicles are required for this division. 40 Puma have already been converted for the NATO spearhead VJTF 2023, the majority of which have already been handed over to the Bundeswehr. Since the Bundeswehr's 13 driving school Pumas are not being converted, the uniform design level S1 is under contract for all Pumas.
However,
Bild
continues to criticize the fact that the Puma is equipped with ultimately dangerous fire extinguishers - at the end of 2022, a powder fire extinguisher is said to have extinguished a cable fire, but also paralyzed the entire technology. The company that manufactured the fire extinguisher had rejected a causal connection, but made it clear that the technical breakdown was completely normal collateral damage. CDU defense expert Ingo Gädechens from the Ostholstein-Storman constituency continues to complain that the powder threatens to disable the tank in any case. According to
Bild
, even after a year, the Ministry of Defense had not considered a halon gas fire extinguisher or a carbon dioxide extinguisher as an alternative.
Puma retrofitting: The opposition is angry about the hand fire extinguisher
Gädechens told
BamS
: “If we really prepare for a conflict, we have to gear everything towards operational readiness. And the environmentally friendly fire extinguisher in the Puma shows the exact opposite: in the event of a fire, the fire is extinguished, but the tank is unable to fight. That can't be meant seriously!” According to the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
the history of the Puma “symbolizes, like no other, the errors in German arms procurement over the past three decades.” The difficult story of the Puma began in December 1999, when the heads of state and government of the European Union decided to set up a rapid reaction force by 2003. This should also include armored combat troops as “medium forces”, which had to be able to be deployed over at least 1,000 kilometers - originally by aircraft.
At that time, according to the NZZ,
the federal government had
to decide on two major armaments projects. On the one hand, a new transport aircraft was to be built to replace the Transall. That was the Airbus A400 M. On the other hand, the army needed a successor to the Marder infantry fighting vehicle introduced in 1971 - the Puma. The federal government decided that a new armored personnel carrier would only be built if it could be transported with the A400 M. This made the maximum transport weight of the A400 M the decisive design feature for the new tank - but at the same time the generals demanded combat power similar to the Leopard main battle tank. Failure was something he was born with.
Puma retrofit: The all-rounder with many birth defects
The Puma should be an all-rounder. But the military requirements on the one hand and the weight limits on the other made this almost impossible. The consortium of Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall still wanted to build it and deliver the first Puma within six years; a noble claim, as the
NZZ
found: "That contradicted all experience in tank construction; the development of the 'Marder', for example, had taken eleven years." It soon became clear that the promises had actually been too full-bodied.
The Puma required numerous new and often highly complex solutions at the edge of what was technically feasible - which was to take revenge and bring Germany into disrepute within NATO, as the
Tagesschau
reported in early 2023 - 18 of the 40 Puma upgraded to S1 and intended for the march to the VJTF fell during an exercise: “A tank problem had already become apparent in the Bundeswehr in 2018: At that time there were reports that far too few battle and armored personnel carriers were ready for use by NATO troops. The fact that negative headlines are now coming from Germany again due to inadequate material is likely to raise eyebrows among many an alliance partner.”
The fact that an entire company, which was supposed to be the first unit to go into combat, was unable to make contact with the enemy motivated the military blogger Thomas Wiegold on Deutschlandfunk to thesis that “a lot had been screwed up” by the Bundeswehr and industry in the design of the Puma.