Top German defence official vows to speed up procurement in response to Ukraine war

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Germany’s defence procurement chief has said her agency is “unleashing” itself from the shackles of bureaucracy as Europe’s largest nation strives to overhaul its neglected armed forces in response to the Ukraine war.

Annette Lehnigk-Emden, who was appointed in April to lead the directorate charged with spending €100bn on upgrading military equipment, said she aimed to deliver a dramatic “cultural change” to hasten the process of buying weapons and ammunition.

Lehnigk-Emden, whose agency has a central role in enacting Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s promise of a “sea change” in Germany’s approach to security and defence following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said her agency was pushing back against excessive regulation and complex requests from the military.

The shift, she told the Financial Times, was about “encouraging people to become courageous, to make decisions . . . and make projects go faster” at all levels of the sprawling 11,000-strong organisation. “Suddenly projects that were planned for 2028 can suddenly be delivered in 2025 or 2026.”

Lehnigk-Emden, a lawyer who has spent three decades as a defence official, was tasked with heading the armed force’s Koblenz-based procurement office by defence minister Boris Pistorius as part of a broader shake-up of the German armed forces. Two days after Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Alfons Mais, head of the German armed forces, said “the army is more or less bare.”

The military has long been plagued by shortages ranging from basic personal equipment for troops to a lack of functioning heavy weapons and ammunition, and its procurement process has sometimes been described by experts as farcical.

A helicopter division was forced to wait nine years for the approval of a new flight helmet with ballistic protection — a commercially available product that it first requested in 2013, according to a recent parliamentary report. In another instance, the report said, the Bundeswehr had been kept waiting since 2011 for a testing kit for nerve agents.

Lehnigk-Emden said her agency had suffered in the past from “a lot of time and little money”, adding that the approach neglected off-the-shelf solutions that would have been simpler and quicker to deliver.

Under Pistorius, who became defence minister in January following the resignation of his gaffe-prone and unenthusiastic predecessor Christine Lambrecht, “people have started thinking in a new way, they are planning projects differently”, Lehnigk-Emden said.

Even after Scholz’s promise of a Zeitenwende or “turning point” in German defence policy, the chancellor has faced criticism over the pace of change and lack of resources.

Speaking in the Bundestag this week, Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, said the chancellor was “not doing justice” to his pledge and warned that the defence budget would face significant shortfalls in the years ahead.

Eva Högl, parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, complained in March that, even if some orders had been placed, “not a cent” from the €100bn special fund for equipping the military had been drawn down in 2022.

Lehnigk-Emden differentiated between signing contracts and money flowing out. But she said her agency will have allocated about €60bn of the €100bn fund by the end of this year, with major deals including contracts to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets and Chinook heavy transport helicopters, and the Israeli Arrow 3 missile defence system.

She stressed that, despite the drive for faster decision-making, her agency still faced other constraints. They included the need to secure parliamentary approval for any defence spending over €25mn — a postwar law to prevent the military from gaining the power it had accrued under Nazi rule.

Lehnigk-Emden said she and her colleagues were “gobsmacked” by the arrest last month of a military officer working for her agency on the accusation of spying for Russia. She said she had no further details on what he was accused of or what kind of information he had been able to access.