German military still has ‘too little of everything’ but progress is being made, commissioner says

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s military still has “too little of everything,” but progress is being made in securing new equipment nearly two years after a special fund was set up to modernize the Bundeswehr, parliament’s commissioner for the armed forces said Tuesday.

Days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to increase Germany’s defense spending to a NATO target of 2% of gross domestic product and set up the 100 billion-euro ($109 billion) special fund. He said that the invasion marked a “turning point.”

A year ago, parliamentary commissioner Eva Högl lamented the slow pace of modernization and stressed the importance of replacing equipment that was given to Kyiv. She said at the time that “the Bundeswehr has too little of everything, and even less since Feb. 24,” when Russia attacked Ukraine.

Germany has become the second-biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the United States.

Presenting this year’s annual report, Högl — who acts as an advocate of servicepeople’s interests in parliament and a liaison between lawmakers and the military — said that much was set in motion last year, but “this must now get to the forces and have an effect, and the forces are rightly impatient.”

“I must unfortunately observe that the Bundeswehr still has too little of everything,” she told reporters in Berlin. “There is a lack of ammunition, of spare parts, of radio devices; there is a lack of tanks, of ships and of aircraft.”

However, she said, things are moving forward. Lawmakers have approved defense contracts worth 47.7 billion euros, and plans have been made for two-thirds of the special military fund.

“This must be continued at high pressure and accelerated,” she added.

Högl’s latest report noted that the military also has a personnel problem, with 181,514 servicepeople at the end of 2023 — 1,537 fewer than a year earlier.

“The Bundeswehr is aging and shrinking,” she said, though she acknowledged that “the issue of personnel has very clearly arrived on the political agenda.”