The three new spy ships that the Ministry of Defense is currently building are expected to cost 1.2 billion euros more than originally planned. This emerges from an internal template for the budget committee Suddeutscher Zeitung, NDR and WDR is available. Accordingly, the two billion euros that the armaments project should one day cost are far from enough.
In the letter, the federal government leaves little room for maneuver for the MPs who are to decide on this in the coming week. She wants to force quick approval and argues that the need is “temporally unavoidable, since the contractor is only bound by the conditions agreed in the 1st amendment contract if the amendment contract is concluded by August 1, 2023”. Should that not be possible, the Ministry of Defense argues, “the consequences for the price to be agreed and the resulting timelines cannot yet be assessed today”. This means that if householders don’t quickly agree to this increase in costs, it could become even more expensive.
A ship expert cannot understand the jump in price
The higher prices were due to inflation, the “uncertain world political situation” and the hourly rates at the shipyard, among other things, according to a request from the Ministry of Defense. The changed security policy situation now requires more expensive equipment on the spy ships.
The shipping expert Stefan Krüger, who had examined the project on behalf of the procurement office of the Bundeswehr, has no understanding for the jump in costs. He was “not obvious from a technical point of view”. “The original design has been technically revised to such an extent that all the demands on the ship can be met with less technical effort than was the case for the original design. From a purely technical point of view, the ships should therefore not have become more expensive,” says Krueger.
“But it is indisputable that we need these ships,” says the SPD
When the contract was signed with the Bremen shipyard Naval Vessels Lürssen (NVL) in June 2021, auditors from the Federal Court of Auditors had “significant concerns”. They criticized the fact that the federal government did not want to discuss exactly how the ships should be built until after the contract had been signed with the shipyard – a billion-dollar award in blind flight and a very bad negotiating situation: even then, the Federal Audit Office feared “additional expenses in the medium term”. When asked, NVL did not comment on the increase in costs “due to confidentiality regulations”, as it says in writing.
SPD budget politician Andreas Schwarz, who is responsible for spending on armaments, said today: “I could see that this would develop. But it is undisputed that we need these ships. And if we want to strengthen the domestic economy in the armaments sector , then we also have to accept that this leads to corresponding additional costs.” His arguments are neither the world situation nor inflation – but the shipyard workers in Germany.