Nine months after the chancellor’s speech on the turning of the era, the Bundeswehr is still blank. The pressure on Defense Minister Lambrecht is growing. Now the SPD politician is writing an urgent call for help to Finance Minister Lindner so that she can get money for ammunition at short notice.
Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has urgently asked Finance Minister Christian Lindner for help in procuring urgently needed ammunition for the Bundeswehr. The “Spiegel” quotes a two-page letter from the social democrat to her liberal cabinet colleague. In it, Lambrecht writes that in order to replenish the largely empty Bundeswehr depots, it is “necessary to immediately provide significant budget funds and declarations of commitment.”
According to Lambrecht, at a top-level meeting in the Chancellery, industry representatives had offered “to be able to deliver significant quantities of urgently needed ammunition ad hoc or at least to be able to produce them in the short to medium term”. These announcements must be “exploited immediately in favor of the Bundeswehr”. According to the report, she wrote verbatim that “one must set an example together and demonstrate the coalition parties’ ability to act and make decisions to ensure defense capability”.
The Bundeswehr is suffering from a dramatic shortage of ammunition because too little was ordered for years. The opposition accuses Lambrecht of inaction. In the past few days, Lambrecht has blamed her predecessors in office for the empty depots.
But criticism of Lambrecht is also getting louder from the traffic light coalition. “It’s amazing that the Ministry of Defense only found out nine months after the Chancellor announced that the turning point was that stocks were still available in the industry or that they could be produced quickly,” said Green budget politician Sebastian Schäfer to the “Spiegel”. “I don’t understand why people didn’t shop faster here.”
A spokesman for Lindner told the magazine that the Federal Minister of Finance and the entire federal government was “an important concern”. If Lambrecht’s department determines “concrete needs for specific tasks,” they will talk about it.
