In the first year of the war, the Ministry of Defense hardly ordered any armaments.

Most of the Bundeswehr stocks delivered to the defenders remained unreplaced, although budget funds were made available for this.

While the direct deliveries from the depots of the German armed forces add up to a value of more than one billion euros, the repeat orders are almost 50 million euros.

Among other things, they were issued for replacement parts for the Panzerhaubitze 2000 and a few dozen trucks.

This emerges from confidential documents from the Ministry of Finance, which are available to the FAZ.

Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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Under the SPD politician Christine Lambrecht, the Ministry of Defense and the procurement bureaucracy apparently largely failed to apply for any requests for refinancing from the Ministry of Finance's budget for the around 50 order items.

As can be seen from the lists submitted, about 14 self-propelled howitzers, 40 infantry fighting vehicles, five multiple rocket launchers and anti-aircraft systems are involved.

In addition, from the large amount of material around 28,000 combat helmets, 18,500 rounds of artillery ammunition, more than 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition, several hundred heavy-duty trailer trucks, swap bodies, bridge-laying systems, dozens of pallets of medical supplies or special vehicles for decontamination and larger stocks of artillery ammunition.

Pistorius wants to talk to the industry quickly

Repeat orders from a special budget item for spending on upgrading in the security area would have been possible.

The budget for this had been increased to around two billion specifically because of the war.

Unlike the Bundeswehr administration, the defense technology industry was able to finance armaments worth around 1.6 billion in direct contractual relationships with Kyiv.

It looks like the non-appointment is due on the one hand to a lack of political will in the SPD-led house, and on the other hand to a military bureaucracy that the former Defense Minister Lambrecht had not reformed during her term in office.

With the sale of Leopard 2 tanks from Bundeswehr battalion stocks, Lambrecht's successor Boris Pistorius now faces the question of reordering with even greater urgency, because this will significantly weaken the few operational combat battalions of the army.

Expenditure for repeat orders for the armaments promised and delivered to Kyiv would have to be financed either from the defense budget (departmental plan 14) or from the sharply increased budget title “Upgrading partner states in the area of ​​security, defense and stabilization”, in which two billion were available last year and two billion this year .2 billion euros are available, most of them for Ukraine.

For its part, Germany can refinance deliveries to Kyiv via the EU, through the so-called European Peace Facility.

The housekeepers in the Bundestag have been missing consistent repeat orders for the material supplied and information from the ministry on this for a long time.

The householders – including those in the governing coalition – had therefore requested regular and detailed information on the repeat orders when the 2023 budget was being determined, probably because of the suspicion that little or nothing had happened.

A suspicion that is confirmed by the overviews now presented by the Ministry of Finance.

The battle helmets were among the few items that had been requested to be backordered from the Treasury Department.

Lambrecht's successor Pistorius had announced that he wanted to talk to industry about repeat orders for the Leopard 2 within a very short space of time - above all the companies Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall.

Apart from financing, the main focus is on production capacities.

After all, repeat orders took several years before the war.

However, if the financing is not even clarified, it is not even possible to order.

The industry had repeatedly pointed out that the processing of their contracts with Kyiv, which took place without involving the Bundeswehr armaments bureaucracy, was relatively quick and easy.

The figures now presented confirm this finding.