Defense Minister Pistorius makes purchasing ammunition a “top priority,” but after that, hardly anything happens. Why did more than a billion euros remain unused in the last budget? A single explanation is not enough.
“From now on, priority 1 in all procurements is the time factor. Everything has to be subordinate to that.” Boris Pistorius marked his first year in office with main sentences like these. The quoted one fell in April 2023, the Defense Minister presented a “bundle of new guidelines and internal instructions” for his office that were intended to speed up the troops – “effective immediately,” said Pistorius.
A particularly high level of effectiveness is needed when it comes to ammunition. Because this is a very decisive factor in war – many people became aware of this in 2022 after Russia began marching on Kiev. When the Ukrainians quickly emptied their depots, Bulgaria cleared its camps and joined Ukraine. Without this help, Kiev would probably have been lost in May of the first year of the war.
Purchasing ammunition became a “top priority”. And then?
“Without ammunition, the most modern weapon systems are of no use,” explained Pistorius last summer, making procurement of ammunition a “top priority.” But after that, not much seems to have happened – because the ministry (BMVg) has by no means exhausted the financial possibilities that the 2023 budget had.
The federal government invested around 845 million euros in ammunition purchases, but another 280 million remained unused. It is even more blatant with the purchase contracts that the 2023 budget would have allowed with payment only in the following years – so-called commitment authorizations. Especially in the defense industry, there are many months to several years between the award of the contract and delivery and payment.
So that enough ammunition orders could be awarded in the 2023 financial year, the payment of which would only burden the budgets of coming years, the traffic light increased the commitment authorizations by a whole billion euros. In total, the Ministry of Defense was able to tie up 1.8 billion euros in contracts for the future. It has to be said that it should have been binding. Because only 630 million were used. The traffic light coalition let the additional billion and almost 180 million more expire.
The CDU and CSU are clearly criticizing this. “The figures on ammunition procurement are ringing alarm bells,” says the Union faction’s rapporteur for the defense budget, Ingo Gädechens. “You know that we urgently need ammunition – but there’s just not enough happening.” His party colleague Roderich Kiesewetter illustrates what “urgently needs ammunition” means in concrete terms: “In the event of a defense, the Air Force would still have ammunition for less than a day, the Army for a few days.” For outsiders, this failure is incomprehensible because no investment was even made in the Bundeswehr’s supplies, says the CDU defense expert ntv.de. “We don’t even provide for our own needs.”
“Each department cooks its own soup”
His group colleague Gädechens sees the reasons for the billions left behind primarily in the structures of the ministry, since “almost two years after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, there is still no central responsibility for ammunition in the Ministry of Defense.” Each department should “cook its own soup” when purchasing ammunition; the responsibility is fragmented and there is no indication of a massive expansion of ammunition procurement
It sounds obvious that such small-scale fragmentation would hardly have been conducive to the goal of achieving a total of 1.8 billion euros at the end of the year. Especially since there are further indications that Pistorius may have had less success with his request to improve the speed and efficiency of processes in the troops and in the ministry than he himself expected and many hoped for.
For months, in response to questions about a possible major reform of the system, the minister gave the following slogan: You don’t change sails and captains on a ship that’s at full speed. In the meantime, he has given Inspector General Carsten Breuer the task of submitting proposals for a fundamentally new structure of the armed forces by April.
Pistorius may have had to realize that even with a whole barrage of new regulations, internal instructions and the announcement that he would immediately establish a culture of error and strengthen responsibility, the bureaucracy and slowness that had been established in his company over the years could not be adequately addressed. Then the old patterns still break through, even when it’s a “matter for the boss”.
But in-house structural problems alone can hardly explain the budget loss of well over a billion. The ministry itself – who is not surprised – tends to do out-of-house causal research. Accordingly, the problem lies with the ammunition manufacturers: “The reason for the underspending compared to the estimate is still delivery delays by industrial companies, which prevent an outflow of funds,” explains a spokesman for the BMVg when asked by ntv.de. According to the Federal Budget Code, an outflow of funds is usually only possible when the products are delivered.
Where is TNT?
But that’s exactly what the authorizations are for, to shop properly and only pay years later when delivery is made. Alexander Müller, defense expert for the FDP, explains to ntv.de how there can still be some devils in the details. Even if ammunition production appears to be inexpensive compared to the development of new weapons, the 18 production sites that produce ammunition in the EU are often dependent on supplies from countries outside the EU. For example for TNT.
South Africa is a non-EU state that has a supplier industry that is important for the German defense industry and those of other countries. And South Africa has a clear political position regarding the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, namely: weapons or ammunition in which our primary products are integrated will not go to Kiev. An attitude that is not that rare – Switzerland, for example, takes almost the same position. “The federal government does not want to buy ammunition that is restricted in its use,” says Müller. But South Africa is an important production location and cannot easily be replaced. “That’s a big reason why we couldn’t order as much ammunition as we actually wanted.”
Security expert Gustav Gressel also sees challenges in ammunition production that are anything but trivial. Anyone who wants to buy the necessary preliminary products on the world market has Vladimir Putin as their most eager competitor, especially for explosives from China. Russia’s war economy has an enormous need for supplier products; “Russian imports of chemical precursors for ammunition production have skyrocketed to record levels since March 2022,” says Gressel.
As an alternative to South Africa, you can try to buy dynamite from the NATO member state Albania; there are also factories in Bosnia and Serbia that deliver without restrictions on use, the main thing is that the price is right. From Gressel’s point of view, the EU states came too late to take a closer look at the supply chains for ammunition production and ensure that they become more reliable. “The EU Commission is spending a lot of money to solve the problem now,” says the scientist. “The situation should get better in the second half of 2024.”
Good news for the Bundeswehr. In the draft budget for 2024 and in the special fund, “a total of almost 7 billion euros in commitment authorizations for the procurement of ammunition are available,” said the BMVg spokesman, i.e. more than three times the budget from last year. Sounds good, but the billion for 2023 also sounded good. Planned sums and what is actually used can be far apart, as was involuntarily proven in 2023.