The Hague: The German military continued its rearmament but still suffered from serious personnel shortages last year, a report presented to the country’s parliament showed. The paper also detailed the European power’s more assertive foreign military involvement, including its navy’s first-ever shots fired in a combat situation.
Presented by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces Eva Högel, the annual paper outlines the military’s status quo while highlighting key shortcomings. Her office was created to ensure parliamentary oversight over the German armed forces.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany has undergone a deep transformation in how it approaches its armed forces. It has come with a major cash injection to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros and a more assertive role for its fighting force internationally.
Symbolising this, last fall, the country ratified an agreement for its first-ever brigade permanently stationed abroad, which will be 5,000 strong and whose facilities are currently being built in Lithuania.
The Bundeswehr’s navy, meanwhile, for the first time ever fired live rounds in a combat setting. It was the frigate Hessen that saw the engagement while on an EU mission in the Red Sea to protect the region’s vital shipping routes against attacks by the Yemeni Houthi rebels.
For the first time in recent years, Germany’s defence spending in 2024 reached the NATO goal of 2% of GDP, the report says, with military expenditures amounting to more than €69 billion, or $75.4 billion.
Roughly a quarter of this was funded from the special one-off cash injection announced by Chancellor Scholz in the form of a “Sondervermögen” — a special fund — worth €100 billion ($109 billion) that was created in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only about 18% of this funding source is remaining, the commissioner said.
The government’s budgetary committee approved a record 97 major procurement decisions last year, up from 55 the year before. Several of these large purchase decisions fall in the domain of air defence, which is itself a key priority highlighted in this year’s report.
