Is it the political context? While a new regional election is taking place in a few days in Brandenburg, which should be marked by the strong progression of parties hostile to support for Ukraine, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) published, on Monday, September 9, an alarming report on Germany’s military spending, the conclusions of which will not fail to interfere with the discussion on the 2025 budget that is opening in the Bundestag.
The document draws a harsh assessment of the rearmament effort led by Berlin since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, highlighting the contrast between the promises made, in a context of great emotion, and the money actually spent. “The world has entered a new era, declared Chancellor Olaf Scholz before the Bundestag on February 27, 2022, during a historic speech. It is clear that we need to invest much more in the security of our country, in order to protect our freedom and our democracy.” With a clearly stated objective: “A high-performance, ultra-modern and progressive federal army that reliably protects us”.
Two and a half years later, the results are disappointing, worry experts from the Kiel Institute. “Germany did not substantially increase its investments in the eighteen months following February 2022 and only accelerated them at the end of 2023”note the authors, who estimate that it will take a hundred years for the German army to regain the level of equipment it had in 2004 – the year taken as a reference – even though the capacities of the Russian arms industry have increased significantly in the last two years, even beyond the losses of Russian equipment in Ukraine. Moscow would be able to produce the entire stock of weapons of the German army in a little more than six months.
4,000 tanks in 1992, 339 in 2021
This late effort by Germany is judged “too weak to make up for lost time”while the federal government is barely managing to replace the equipment sent to Ukraine. In summary, “The change of era is, for the moment, only an empty phrase”said IfW Kiel President Moritz Schularick. “Despite the rhetoric of changing times (« the turning point »)the gap between the military capabilities of Germany and Russia continues to widen”.
The institute documents the very substantial decline in the Bundeswehr’s equipment since the 1990s, in the six major categories of armament: Germany had 4,000 combat tanks in 1992, then another 2,400 in 2004, but only 339 in 2021, while the number of combat aircraft has been halved in twenty years (to 226). A “peace dividend” that would have allowed the country to save between 400 and 600 billion euros over the last three decades.
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