The only sluggish rearmament of the Bundeswehr is now also causing disputes within the traffic light government. The FDP-led Ministry of Finance is not willing to give the SPD-led Defense Department additional money for much-needed ammunition without further ado.
In a letter to the state secretary level on December 1, Finance State Secretary Steffen Saebisch accused the defense department of poor management. Christine Lambrecht’s house failed to plan more money for ammunition in the budget deliberations that had just ended. Saebisch refers to the 50 billion euros in the regular budget and the special fund of 100 billion euros that the government launched in response to the war in Ukraine.
The lack of ammunition has long been known
“As you know,” says the letter to the fellow state secretaries in the defense department, the defense ministry has every opportunity to set priorities and use “the resources accordingly.” During the budget deliberations, the House also failed to express the “need to procure ammunition.” About the dispute first mirror reported.
Defense Minister Lambrecht had previously asked in a letter to Finance Minister Christian Lindner to get the material problems in the Bundeswehr under control together. It has been public knowledge for almost two years that the Bundeswehr does not have the ammunition stocks that NATO stipulates. In an emergency, the troops should be able to hold out for 30 days. In the course of decades of savings in the Bundeswehr, however, stocks were reduced and depots were abandoned, and the Bundeswehr has recently given large quantities of ammunition to the Ukraine. It is now clear that ammunition must be procured again for at least 20 billion euros.
On Monday there was a meeting with representatives of the defense industry in the Chancellery to talk about production capacities, among other things. Lambrecht then contacted Lindner and asked them to spend a “significant amount” of money so that they could request offers from the industry. She had written: “Let’s set an example together and demonstrate the coalition parties’ ability to act and make decisions to ensure the defense capability that is urgently needed to make the turning point successful.”
Lindner’s State Secretary criticizes the processes in Lambrecht’s department
But Lindner’s state secretary sees the defense department asked to stop problems in-house. At the meeting in the Chancellery, which Saebisch also attended, the armaments industry complained about the “complicated, sometimes non-transparent and inconsistent planning of requirements and bureaucratic ordering processes,” but it wasn’t due to a lack of money. The letter goes on to say that the Ministry of Finance is ready to help: “This would also include support in improving your planning processes.”
Lambrecht has been under considerable pressure for weeks. In the regular budget, not even ten billion euros a year are available for purchases. A large part of the Bundeswehr budget is spent on operations and personnel costs. Now she can modernize the troops with 100 billion euros. But the structures in the procurement organization are no longer designed for such sums. Most recently, budget politicians had complained that there were too few templates from the ministry that form the basis for buying material and equipment.