Germany’s armed forces have three years to acquire the equipment to tackle a possible Russian attack on NATO territory, the head of military procurement said Saturday.
Defence spending has risen the political agenda since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and more recently, with the United States pushing NATO members to increase their commitments.
“Everything necessary to be fully prepared to defend the country must be acquired by 2028,” Annette Lehnigk-Emden, head of the Federal Office for Military Procurement, told Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Chief of Defence General Carsten Breuer recently warned that Russia could be in a position to “launch a large-scale attack against NATO territory” as early as 2029.
He said there was a Russian build-up of ammunition and tanks for a possible attack on NATO’s Baltic members.
Lehnigk-Emden stressed that Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s new government was enabling the upgrade by allocating hundreds of billions of euros for defence.
She said the priority would be for heavy equipment such as Skyranger anti-aircraft tanks.
Merz has made rearmament a priority of his coalition government to make it “the most powerful conventional army in Europe”.
Rearmament had already begun under the previous government of Olaf Scholz after Russia launched its war in Ukraine.
And US President Donald Trump has raised the temperature further this year by pushing NATO members to increase their defence spending to five percent of GDP from the current level of two percent.
Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Thursday that 50,000 to 60,000 new soldiers would be needed in the coming years to meet the increased defence needs of NATO. Last year, the army had more than 180,000 soldiers and set a goal of exceeding 203,000 by 2031.
US To Stick With NATO
Earlier, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that he had “no doubt” the United States would remain in NATO after a high-stakes meeting with President Donald Trump in the White House.
Merz said he had raised the issue directly with Trump in talks on Thursday, during the chancellor’s first trip to Washington since taking office last month.
“The question that was asked was: do you have any plans to leave NATO? I can say it was answered with a very clear no,” Merz said at an event hosted by the German family-owned business association.
“I have no doubt at all that the American government will stick to NATO now after we all said we’re doing more, we’re making sure that we can defend ourselves in Europe.
“I think this expectation was not unjustified. We have unfortunately been free-riders on American security guarantees for years, and that’s changing,” he said.
Merz, earlier this year, spearheaded moves to exempt most defence spending from Germany’s strict constitutional debt limits and has signalled his intention to raise military spending by tens of billions of euros.
During an Oval Office press conference Thursday, Trump welcomed Merz’s moves to increase spending to patch up Germany’s dilapidated military.
“I know that you are spending more money on defence now, quite a bit more money, and that’s a positive thing,” Trump said.
The US president has lobbied NATO partners to up their spending commitments to five percent of GDP from the current level of two percent.
Defence ministers from the US-led military alliance met in Brussels on Thursday to discuss a change to the spending target ahead of a NATO summit later this month.
U.S. Defense Chief Pete Hegseth indicated allies were close to a deal to boost military budgets.
NATO chief Mark Rutte has put forward a proposal to meet Trump’s target, which would see members spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on core military areas by 2032 and 1.5 percent on broader security-related items, such as infrastructure.
Via: Agence France-Presse
