German military so short of arms it cannot fulfil Nato duties, says report
GERMANY’S armed forces are suffering from severe shortages of weapons and equipment that put the country’s ability to meet its Nato commitments in doubt, a parliamentary watchdog warned yesterday.
The German military is “not equipped to meet the tasks before it”, Hans-peter Bartels, the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, said as he presented his annual report.
Operational readiness is “dangerously low” and the country’s ability to take over a front-line Nato task force must now be “in question”, he warned.
The report described how only 95 of the German army’s 244 Leopard main battle tanks are currently operational, because of maintenance issues.
None of the German navy’s six submarines was operational at the end of last year, and only nine of a planned 15 frigates are in service.
On several occasions last year, none of the Luftwaffe’s 14 A400M transport aircraft was airworthy, and replacement aircraft had to be chartered to bring serving troops home.
There is also a serious shortage of personnel, and 21,000 junior officer and NCO positions are unfilled.
Germany is due to take command of Nato’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), a key unit tasked with deterring Russian aggression in Europe, at the start of next year. But Mr Bartels warned: “The German contribution to the VJTF must remain in question.”
The German tank battalion that is due to take command of the task force currently has just nine operational tanks out of a total of 48. Only six of the army’s 30 logistics battalions are fully equipped with vehicles, and only 30 per cent of planned equipment is actually operational.
The report comes a day after it was leaked that German military units do not have sufficient winter clothing, tents or protective gear to fulfil their commitments to the VJTF. The report puts the blame for the shortages squarely on Angela Merkel’s government, saying the current defence budget of €38.5billion (£34billion) is too low.
Donald Trump, the US president, has demanded that Nato’s European members contribute more to the cost of their defence and raise military spending to meet the alliance’s target of 2 per cent of GDP.
Britain is one of six European countries that now meet this target, but Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is lagging behind. It spent 1.13 per cent of its GDP on defence last year, and though Mrs Merkel’s new coalition deal pledges to boost spending to €42.4billion by 2021, that would only account for 1.15 per cent of projected GDP.
The parliamentary report comes three years after a scandal over military shortages that saw German troops forced to use broomsticks instead of guns on a Nato training exercise. At the time, the government pledged to address the shortages, but Mr Bartels said those promises had not been honoured.
“The pledged turnaround in personnel, equipment and financing is to be welcomed, but pledges alone do not make anything better,” he said. “What I missed in the coalition agreement were concrete proposals on how the planned increase from 185,000 troops to 200,000 is to be financed.”