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Germany has announced a sweeping overhaul of its sprawling arms procurement agency as Berlin strives to speed up spending under its vastly expanded defence budget.
The defence ministry said it would tear up the existing structures at the agency, known by its German acronym Baainbw, which in the past was notorious for taking years to reach decisions and imposing elaborate, custom-made requirements.
Defence minister Boris Pistorius said the overhaul was needed so “the enormous sums in the defence budget over the coming years can be spent quickly and efficiently”.
Pistorius said implementation would begin in the summer in a phased manner, because the change would essentially be like “open-heart surgery” on a huge organisation that would have to continue functioning while the restructuring took place.
But he said that they also had to act quickly at a time when the annual defence budget is set to balloon to €188bn by 2030, adding: “We do not have years to spare.”
An official familiar with the plans described it as “quite a revolution for a bureaucracy”.
The Baainbw, based in the western German city of Koblenz, has a staff of 13,000 people and its intricate demands in previous years have been dubbed “gold-plated solutions”.
The office has sped up its work dramatically since 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine led Berlin to promise to take a leading role in European defence and security, more than doubling its annual defence budget from €47bn in 2021 to €118bn this year.
Yet government officials and industry executives say the agency has remained a bottleneck, prompting last autumn Pistorius to commission a review of its structure, carried out over six months by his secretary for armaments, Jens Plötner.
Under the plans announced on Wednesday, existing Baainbw departments and divisions will be abolished and replaced with a new “matrix system” intended to mirror the armed forces divisions of land, air, sea and cyber.
Special groups of experts will be formed around weapons systems such as ammunition, artillery or guided missiles.
Regional offices will be set up around Germany with different specialisms, as well as a representative office in Brussels to improve networking with the EU and Nato, and co-ordinate multinational programmes.
Pistorius said the new system would also ensure greater co-operation with industry, better supply chain oversight and improved price controls.
There would be more focus on innovation and future technologies, he said, as well as a special fast-track division to quickly buy urgently needed off-the-shelf products.
There would be a special division for dealing with complex projects such as fighter jets or warships, which have a history of cost overruns and delays.
Pistorius, a member of the centre-left Social Democrats that are the junior partner in Germany’s ruling coalition, said that he would “certainly not be cutting any jobs” at Baainbw. But he said that the objective was also not to allow the agency to expand. Instead, the focus will be on staffing the new regional offices and filling the hundreds of expert posts that are currently unfilled.
Some industry executives have voiced scepticism at the ability of reforms to work. They point to previous failed attempts, before the war in Ukraine, to overhaul the agency, which met with resistance from staff, unions and some politicians. But officials hope the political will behind the Zeitenwende — as the German pivot on defence is known — will help them succeed.
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