[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

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Strange, in Germany you must not. And it is a Swiss newspaper, not a German one. Think I must then stop to refere to the NZZ. Thats a loss, its one of the few remaining best newspapers we have in German-speaking Europe, and probably Europe in general. As Helmut Schmidt once put it: "Why should I read the daily breafings of the Bundesnachrichtendiest if I could spend the same time better with reading the NZZ?"
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A special fund of 100 billion euros, a current defense budget of 50 billion euros, and yet the German armed forces are threatened with running out of money in two years. How can that be?

The Norwegian Arctic, German soldiers in white uniforms skiing and snowmobiling through the snow, assault rifle in front of their chests, backpacks on their backs. Mountain troops from Bavaria, "extreme terrain and extreme weather are their daily business," says an off-screen voice. "With this knowledge, the Gebirgsjäger troop also positions itself strongly for long-term national and alliance defense."

Then the video ends, a Bundeswehr promotional film taken last winter of the "Ice Crystal 2022" exercise. It shows German soldiers training in ice and snow in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees. That was before the Russian attack on Ukraine. Since then, Berlin has been committed to making the Bundeswehr operational again in order to be able to defend Germany and NATO territory against an attack.

To this end, the troops should be given everything they need. This is what Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in his "turn of the times" speech at the end of February last year. A special fund of 100 billion euros and an annual defense budget of 50 billion - after the social budget, Germany spends more money on nothing else than on its defense.

No exercise should fail any more for lack of funds, former Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht had said. But when the German Army wanted to send the mountain troops to Norway again this winter, financial planners shook their heads. "Ice Crystal 2023" took place without the Germans. The reason: no money.

One could overlook this, could say that it was, after all, only a single exercise. But the cancellation of "Eiskristall 2023" may be just the harbinger of what Andreas Schwarz, budget and defense expert for the Social Democrats, describes as follows: "If we don't massively increase the defense budget, things will soon look bleak for the Bundeswehr."

Schwarz is not just anyone. He is responsible for the defense budget for the chancellor's party. He is a powerful man. His counterpart in the opposition is Ingo Gädechens. He and Schwarz are rivals. But in this case, the Christian Democrat and the Social Democrat are on the same page. "If it stays with the current financial planning, the Bundeswehr will soon be broke," Gädechens says.

100 billion in special assets, 50 billion in the defense budget, and the Bundeswehr will soon be broke? To explain this, you have to look at what the Bundeswehr spends all that money on.

First of all, there is the special fund, 100 billion euros, financed by debt. It is supposed to be used to buy urgently needed weapons and equipment. This includes new fighter jets (F-35), transport helicopters (Chinook), maritime reconnaissance aircraft (Poseidon), submarines, warships, armored personnel carriers, air defense systems, digital radios, all included in a list approved by the Bundestag last year.
Ammunition, which the Bundeswehr needs at least as badly, is largely not included.

When the government incurs debt, it has to pay interest. How high these will be was revealed by the Defense Ministry at an internal event in Bonn in January. There, a ministerial housekeeper said that interest of 13 billion euros could be expected over the years.

This means that there are not 100 billion euros in the special assets, but only 87 billion. Added to this is the high inflation. All in all, deductions from the special assets are so large that the procurement list adopted by the Bundestag last summer is now obsolete. Already at the end of last year, K130 corvettes and F126 frigates had to be removed from the list.

Now, according to NZZ information, the Defense Ministry is said to be considering removing the procurement of 15 Eurofighter ECRs from the special assets list as well. The aircraft are designed to jam the enemy's electronics and disable its radar sites. They would now have to be financed from the regular defense budget. But there they compete with other projects. In addition, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has already hinted at having to shift further projects from the special assets to the defense budget.

But that is unlikely to be possible. The defense budget in Germany this year is 50.1 billion euros. That is also a lot of money, much more than in most years since reunification. Nevertheless, only a small portion of this remains for the Bundeswehr to invest in new weapons, ammunition and equipment.

That's because just under half of the budget is spent on personnel and a third on day-to-day operations. Even from the rest, not everything remains for investments in new weapons, equipment and ammunition. Of this, for example, the expenditures for NATO must also be made.

All in all, this leaves around 7.8 billion euros for military procurement this year. That is 15.5 percent of the total defense budget. 1.1 billion euros of that will go toward buying new ammunition, a fraction of what the Bundeswehr just needed. Just to stockpile ammunition for 30 days of war, as required by NATO, the German armed forces budget between 30 and 40 billion euros. Their stockpiles are as good as empty.

The Bundeswehr is therefore in urgent need of significantly more money to invest in its equipment. But if the defense budget does not increase significantly in the next few years, it may soon no longer be able to invest any money at all from the current budget in new weapons, equipment and ammunition.
Andreas Schwarz of the Social Democrats assumes that this "catastrophe" will occur as early as 2025. Ingo Gädechens from the CDU/CSU takes a similar view.

There are three reasons for this.

The first reason is personnel costs. The Bundeswehr currently has 183,000 soldiers and 80,000 civilian employees. They are all public service employees. Employers and unions have been negotiating a new collective agreement for months. The employee side wants 10.5 percent more pay, while the public employers are offering 5. The mediation round is currently underway. Schwarz and Gädechens expect an agreement on 8 percent. This would result in an annual increase of about 1.5 billion euros in personnel spending by the Bundeswehr. Possible one-time payments have not yet been taken into account.

The second reason is the inflation rate. Whether the Bundeswehr is buying new weapons and ammunition or meat and potatoes, everything costs more money than in previous years.

The third reason seems paradoxical at first glance: It is the special assets. Tanks, guns, airplanes, helicopters, ships and boats - basically all the new equipment that the Bundeswehr will be getting in the coming years - mean that there is less and less money left in the defense budget for investment. The reason is the cost of maintaining these highly complex, high-maintenance weapons systems.

For example, the F-35 fighter aircraft costs 80,000 euros to fly a Eurofighter for one hour. Ingo Gädechens reckons that the cost of the F-35 will be significantly higher. He would have liked to find out how much from the Ministry of Defense. But the ministry is stonewalling. "The ministry says they first have to do a requirements analysis on the costs of using the aircraft," says Gädechens. For him, this is an unmistakable sign that the expenditure "will be extremely high.

With the new weapons from the special fund, it's like buying a car. While you used to be able to repair an old car yourself, today even minor damage to the bumper costs thousands of euros because dozens of sensors are installed there that are connected to the car's electronic and computer system.

The situation is similar for tanks, airplanes, ships and boats. The Bundeswehr can hardly repair its equipment itself. It has become far too complex. It needs industry to do it. Years ago, the industry said that in the future, it would not be the sale of a new weapon that would bring in the most money, but long-term maintenance and repair.

The Bundeswehr has more money than ever before, and yet it runs the risk of soon being unable to make any more investments from its current budget. This is because, if the defense budget remains unchanged, all additional spending on personnel and operating costs will be charged to the procurement budget.

Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, recognized this shortly after taking office in January. Since then, a figure has been circulating:10 billion. According to Pistorius, that is the amount by which the defense budget would have to increase in the coming years, at least, in order to cope with the expected expenditures and at the same time be able to buy weapons and ammunition.

But at the moment, it doesn't look like that will happen. The federal government has not yet been able to agree on the key points for the 2023 budget and subsequent years. There are too many desires of the individual ministries, such as 12 billion euros for the basic child allowance, because of which other ministries would have to make savings.

Finance Minister Christian Lindner has made it clear on several occasions that there will be no new debts or tax increases with him. Only what the federal government takes in through taxes can be spent, he said. The amount of this is not yet known, the current tax estimate is not yet available.

Ingo Gädechens fears that Pistorius will get at most 3 billion euros more for 2024. Andreas Schwarz says that, according to his calculations, the Bundeswehr needs 10 billion more to avoid hitting the wall in two years. But actually, 70 billion euros a year would be needed in the long term to meet NATO's financial targets and thus become fully operational again.

An army has value when it has well-trained and motivated soldiers, modern equipment and sufficient ammunition. Recently, a senior officer wrote on Twitter that many young soldiers leave the Bundeswehr not because of hard training, but because of the lack of material. They are frustrated, he said, because they were promised modern equipment that does not exist.

There is one piece of good news, however. The Army announced that the mountain troops would again participate in the "Ice Crystal" exercise next year. It would again be in the exercise calendar as usual, it said.