Germany's military build up continues, but personnel shortages remain

Yahoo

11-03-2025

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The German military continued its rearmament but still suffered from serious personnel shortages last year, a report presented to the country's parliament on Tuesday 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.
Symbolizing 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 defense 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 USD.
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 defense, which is itself a key priority highlighted in this year's report.
In 2024, Germany decided to buy both the Skyranger 30 from Rheinmetall and the Arrow 3 from Israel. The country also ordered new Leopard main battle tanks and 22 self-propelled howitzers to replace those the country sent to Ukraine.
But money alone cannot solve some things, and one of the most stubbornly persistent issues plaguing Germany's armed forces remained a central topic in 2024: Staffing.
While recruitment increased by 8%, bringing in more than 20,000 new people last year, over a quarter of them chose to leave after their six-month probationary period. Meanwhile, nearly 20% of non-enlisted and 28% of enlisted positions remained vacant. The Bundeswehr is 21,826 heads short of its 203,000 active personnel target, the report laid out.
There was a significant structural reform to report, too. The cyber warfare arm last year was elevated to become a full branch of the German military, alongside the Luftwaffe, navy and land forces.
On a touchier subject, the report included several pages discussing cases of neo-Nazi sympathies among the ranks and institutional shortcomings in addressing and successfully investigating these situations. In one case, a soldier had reportedly played an SS song for comrades. Only after several years did the case make it to trial; by then, the witnesses professed not to be able to recall whose phone had been playing the song or who had put an end to it.
A new enforcement mechanism became available in 2024 following an amendment to the Soldiers Act passed the year prior that sought to accelerate such proceedings. While only a 'small minority of soldiers' harbored extremist views, this mechanism was touted as being a necessary and 'sharp and effective means against identified enemies of the constitution in the Bundeswehr.'
Germany's incoming governing coalition of conservatives and social democrats has promised to continue down the path of revitalizing and building up the country's military might.
To do so, incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has suggested exempting defense spending from the country's constitutionally enshrined debt ceiling, a move that would have been largely unthinkable in notoriously fiscally frugal Germany until recently. While this particular proposal is still mired in a political tug-of-war at present, the more militarist tone of the past few years appears here to stay.