German military lacks equipment and recruits, says damning report

The German Bundeswehr is still underequipped, understaffed and overly bureaucratic, a new parliamentary report has revealed. Opposition politicians also say it is ignoring its problem with far-right extremism.

German soldiers sometimes have to rely on civilian helicopters to transport them around in Afghanistan, while vital equipment such as body armor has to be borrowed, according to the new parliamentary Bundeswehr report presented on Tuesday.

The annual study, partly based on interviews with soldiers and visits to military bases across the country, also detailed a rise in reports of sexual harassment and some instances of far-right extremism among soldiers.

"I'd like to report: It's spring, everything will be new. But the truth is: It's still winter," Bundestag military commissioner Hans-Peter Bartels said as he presented his work at a press conference in Berlin.

The biggest problem that Bundeswehr soldiers complained about was the lack of equipment, despite repeated government promises, dating back to a 2014 NATO summit, of a change in direction. That does not count as a surprising development, considering the barrage of poor press the German military has been facing.

Heavy machinery was a particular concern: Bartels found that often less than 50 percent of the Bundeswehr's tanks, ships and aircraft were available at any one time, either for training or operational purposes.

"Spare parts are still missing; maintenance in industry is dragging; the training programs are suffering," Social Democrat Bartels said. "An absolute must is the acceleration of procurement."

The problem, he added, was not necessarily a lack of money — he noted with approval that Germany's defense budget has risen by €5 billion to €43.2 billion ($49.3 billion) this year — but the "bureaucracy monster" that the army has become. "Too much work is being done twice or against other work," he said. "Too much work time is being wasted on poor structures. And not every expensive digitalization project is always a help."

German military experts could only agree. "Despite efforts made by the current administration, observing significant progress remains difficult," Sebastian Schulte, chief editor of German defense and security publication griephan, told DW.

In response to the report, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen insisted the army was moving in the right direction. "We must take the long view and move forward strongly," she said in a statement, before adding that the army was modernizing rapidly.

Recruitment troubles

Another worry for the Defense Ministry is the stagnation of its post-conscription recruitment drive, which began after Germany scrapped national service in 2011. Though the Bundeswehr is expanding overall (the report found a net gain of 4,000 professional soldiers), most of these were won by extending existing contracts. In other words, the German military is aging.

The government has promised 198,500 active personnel by 2025, up from the current 181,000, but the number of new recruits dropped from 23,000 in 2017 to 20,000 last year.

The report also detailed the German army's struggles to fill key specialist positions, a shortage of skilled labor that is reflected across the country's job market. Germany's highest ranking soldier, Inspector General Eberhard Zorn, admitted on Tuesday that there were "rather large gaps" in the military's IT departments, medical staff, personnel management and logistics sector.

But Zorn insisted that this was "no reason to panic, either because of the figures or the quality of the applicants," he told the newspaper network RND.