Vyacheslav Filippov — on the reorganization of the Ministry of Defense and rearmament of Germany Almost three months ago, on January 19, Boris Pistorius (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) took up his duties as Minister of Defense of Germany, having received a heavy inheritance from Kristine Lambrecht (also SPD).
The shortage of equipment and military equipment; the need to repair barracks in a deplorable state; the slow pace of arms purchases — all this is not a complete list of problems of the German army.
The new minister zealously began to correct the mistakes of his predecessors and decided to put an end to the so-called "principle of dispersion of responsibility" in the ministry, which leads to delaying the implementation of important projects, including the procurement of weapons. One of his key decisions is, in particular, to reduce the number of senior personnel of the Ministry of Defense from 370 to 160 employees. Pistorius replaced Eberhard Zorn as Inspector General of the Bundeswehr with Carsten Breuer, and Gabriele Korb as head of the arms procurement department with her former deputy Annette Lenik-Emden.
The Minister also restored a special headquarters for operational management and planning, which is designed to establish cooperation between different departments in the defense department. Brigadier General Christian Froyding, who is now part of Pistorius' inner circle, has been appointed as the head. Such a headquarters was created in the late 1960s by the then head of the Ministry of Defense (who later became Chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, but in 2012 it was abolished by the decision of Thomas de Maiziere (Minister of Defense from 2011 to 2013).
About the positive for the Bundeswehr
As they say in the political and industrial circles of Germany, the Bundeswehr under the new minister has increased the pace of implementation of procurement plans. Until now, the process of registration and approval of military orders has been a headache for everyone — both the government and parliament, and the minister, and defense companies. According to local media, when Pistorius took up his post, he was immediately amazed at how many signatures were needed to obtain a permit for the purchase of a particular type of weapons or equipment.
"In total, 70-80 procurement orders can be submitted to Parliament for consideration by the end of the year, each for an amount exceeding €25 million," Thomas Muller, head of the defense company Hensoldt, told the Handelsblatt newspaper. "It would be an absolute record," he stated. The publication noted that Mueller's data coincide with information from the budget committee of the Bundestag, which is obliged to make a decision on military orders above €25 million. For comparison, during the whole of 2021, only 43 procurement projects were sent to the committee for consideration.
After the start of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, speaking in the Bundestag on February 27, 2022, announced that the country's authorities would allocate €100 billion from the state budget to a special fund for the modernization of its armed forces. The funds were planned to be used for investments and projects in the field of armaments.
However, by the end of 2022, not a cent had been spent from the special fund for the needs of the army. In the military circles of Germany, they complained that the leadership did not even bother to make up for the shortage of such weapons as self-propelled artillery units (ACS) Panzerhaubitze 2000 ("Panzerhaubitz-2000"), which were previously transferred to Kiev. Now the situation is changing.
As of February of this year, according to Pistorius himself, the fund was "bound by contracts", that is, it is already specifically planned to spend €30 billion. At the end of March, the budget committee finally approved €184 million for the purchase of ten new self-propelled guns. By the summer, it is planned to present projects for the procurement of heavy transport helicopters and IRIS-T SLM ("Iris-T") air defense systems. By July, it is expected that projects on the acquisition of new guided missiles for the Navy, walkie-talkies, artillery ammunition, and IT systems will be sent to parliament.
It will not be possible to catch up quickly
However, both politicians and the military recognize that it is impossible to catch up with what has been lost for years in a short period of time. "Unfortunately, the lost first year of the existence of the special fund, without any significant purchases, will not be able to catch up as quickly as it would be necessary," Florian Khan (Christian Social Union), a member of the Bundestag Defense Committee, admitted in an interview with Handelsblatt. In his opinion, the process of correcting the situation has not yet been established, and the necessary structures have not been created for this.
The most interesting thing, Khan noted, is that the Social Democrats themselves are blocking some procurement projects in the budget committee of the parliament that involve spending funds from the special fund. "We will see that neither in the first nor in the second quarters will anything move from the dead point," Khan believes.
This week, the Inspector (commander) of the German Land Forces, Lieutenant General Alphonsus Mayes informed his superiors that Germany is currently unable to fully fulfill its obligations in NATO. According to the Bild newspaper, Mayes sent a report to the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr in early March, in which he noted that the combat readiness of all German ground forces may decrease altogether due to "ongoing underfunding" and the provision of military assistance to Ukraine, within which the German army has to give up its equipment, as well as spend time and effort on training of Ukrainian soldiers.
Germany has promised to transfer a fully equipped division (about 16.5 thousand military) to NATO by 2025. In terms of personnel, it is 79% staffed, but it absolutely lacks military equipment — according to Mayes, it "will not be enough in the foreseeable future." "Even if we now turn to the reserves of all ground forces, there will be less than 60% [of the necessary equipment] at our disposal," the report says. The general also pointed out problems with the purchase of new walkie-talkies designed to replace outdated devices.
"Despite all efforts, the combat capability of the division by 2025 can only be limited," Mayes stated. He pointed out that the lack of resources, support for Ukraine and the implementation of NATO plans lead to "serious problems in the training of other units of the ground forces." According to him, if the situation is not corrected, the army "will not be able to withstand high-intensity battles." The general concludes that the provision of a second fully equipped division to the alliance by 2027, as promised by the German authorities, is "unrealistic".
Betting on the global market, and the risks?
It is significant that Pistorius intends to focus less on the German industry and rely on the expensive and long-term development of his own samples of equipment in the issue of arms purchases, but rely more on the world market. This is reflected in the Ministry's plans for heavy transport helicopters — it intends to purchase the already tested American Boeing CH-47 Chinook (Boeing CH-47 Chinook). Perhaps the story of the Puma infantry fighting vehicles ("Puma") produced by the German companies Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann also played a role in this approach. Last year, it turned out that the 18 IFVs they delivered were faulty, but they were planned to be adopted by the NATO Rapid Reaction Forces from this year. The German government thereby got into an extremely difficult situation.
But the focus on abroad has another side. Experts draw attention to the fact that the defense budget of Germany in 2023 (a little more than € 50 billion) expects to spend € 324 million on military research, which is almost 40% less than a year earlier (€530 million). From 2024, it is planned to allocate even less funds for these purposes — only € 200 million. That is, at a time when other countries, in particular the United States and China, are investing more and more money in military research, Germany is saving and reducing this item of expenditure.
Experts fear that thus, in the distant future, Germany simply will not have its own modern weapons and it will have to purchase almost all advanced combat systems on the international market. This also means the deindustrialization of the country, from which many firms and specialists are now "migrating" to the United States due to the energy crisis, excessive bureaucratization, etc. Small defense companies without orders from the Bundeswehr simply will not survive.
Pistorius should not delude himself
Just a couple of weeks after Pistorius became the new defense minister, he took first place in the popularity ratings among German politicians. The media idolized and continue to idolize him, he plunged headlong into work: here Pistorius rides a tank, here he is on a frigate or swims with marines on an inflatable boat in Kiel Bay, here he communicates with ordinary soldiers in the barracks. The military finally got a leader who served in the army, and it's not surprising that they fell in love with him so much after Lambrecht, whom many were simply ashamed of as defense minister.
Pistorius made his first foreign visit to Ukraine, then went to a difficult partner — to Poland, relations with which are not going through the best of times. In general, the new head of the Ministry of Defense really made a lot of efforts to show that Scholz made the right choice by appointing him to the post in a difficult geopolitical situation.
However, Pistorius should not flatter himself, any little thing can bring down the ratings. In 2009, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was appointed Minister of Defense (he held the post from 2009 to 2011), who became a kind of star of the then ruling coalition (CDU/CSU bloc and the Free Democratic Party) and headed the rating of the most popular German politicians. But, as they say, the varnish quickly came off. His fall was as rapid as his rise: in 2011, zu Guttenberg resigned due to a plagiarism scandal discovered in a dissertation.
Popularity alone is not enough to achieve the goals that Pistorius set for himself, and this, judging by his statements, is nothing less than the reorganization of the ministry, accelerating the pace of decision-making and procurement of ammunition and equipment, the speedy termination of the Bundeswehr mission in Mali and a significant increase in the military budget. He has to face problems when implementing the first goal. The question arises, as a matter of fact, what should Pistorius do with the party members who remained in their posts, in particular as state secretaries, after Lambrecht? Dismiss him by increasing the number of opponents in the ranks of his own party? Transfer to another place?
The situation with the military is also unstable. This week it became known that the officers of the Bundeswehr are extremely dissatisfied with the removal of Eberhard Zorn, who is very popular in the army. "This is not how an honored soldier is treated," Bild previously quoted one of its sources in the German Armed Forces. Many military men do not like the appointment of Froyding as the head of the operational management and planning staff, since most department heads are simply above him in rank. So Pistorius should be afraid of fighting with those officers whom he has deprived or wants to deprive of power.
Bild writes that in the Bandler Block (the unofficial name of the German Ministry of Defense, after the name of the building complex), grumbling is already "beginning" about how the communication process in the department is going on. So, it was from the media that Lenik-Emden learned about her promotion — appointment to the post of head of the arms procurement department, and State Secretary for Armaments Benedict Zimmer reads articles in the press almost every day that he is about to be fired, although this does not actually happen.
Pistorius is aware of the problems, but...
Such a leapfrog and rumors paralyze the work of the defense department, and Pistorius needs to put an end to all speculation as soon as possible. The minister himself seems to be aware of this — on April 6, he sent an email to employees, urging them to remain calm and asking them to trust him. At the same time, according to the DPA agency, the Ministry of Defense is on the verge of new personnel changes, the end of which is not yet in sight.
Pistorius has two more years before the next Bundestag elections to contribute to the improvement of the situation in the German army. The Minister obviously has the will to do this. The bad news for him is that two years for the reorganization of the German Armed Forces, providing the Bundeswehr with the necessary equipment and advanced combat systems, creating mechanisms to accelerate the procurement process is clearly not enough — it takes a decade or even more. According to Eva Hoegl, the Commissioner of the German Parliament for Defense, it may take about 50 years only for the complete modernization of the Bundeswehr infrastructure.
By 2031, the German army is also unlikely to be able to reach the target of 203 thousand military personnel, since now, on the contrary, there is an outflow of personnel. For the second year in a row, more soldiers leave the Bundeswehr than enter the service. The main reasons for leaving the ranks of the army are prolonged disability and termination of the contract during the six-month probationary period after joining the armed forces.
The snowball of accumulated problems in the Bundeswehr is too big to cope with them overnight. At this stage, much depends on whether Pistorius will achieve the level of trust that he needs to make very painful decisions, or whether rebellious generals and employees will stick sticks in his wheels in all his endeavors.
