Berlin Approves Bundeswehr Procurement Acceleration Act to Cut Delays by 2035

Berlin Approves Bundeswehr Procurement Acceleration Act to Cut Delays by 2035

Published:

July 23, 2025

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Updated:

July 23, 2025

Defense Budgets / Policy

Diego Ramos

U.S. Army photo by Pvt. Kadence Connors

Germany has passed a new law to speed up military spending. On July 23, the cabinet approved the Bundeswehr Procurement Acceleration Act. It now heads to the Bundestag, where coalition leaders expect a vote by the end of August. The law will stay in place until 2035 and will take the place of a more limited fast-track measure passed back in 2022.

The move comes after repeated warnings from officers. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, commanders have pointed to slow procurement as a threat to readiness. Current rules can stretch a basic radar order into a five-year ordeal. Delays often come from tender protests, multi-layered audits, and EU-mandated waiting periods. Last winter, engineers reported waiting six months for parts for self-propelled howitzers. According to industry sources, those delays forced some units to strip vehicles for parts during two NATO drills.

The new law removes a major cause of those slowdowns. If a contractor protests and loses, procurement officers can now sign a deal without waiting for court appeals. The law also allows tenders to begin before the Bundestag finalizes funding, if national security is at stake. In those cases, budget officials must flag the risk in the bid documents. It’s then up to the supplier to decide whether to compete.

Competition starts at €50,000 for goods instead of the old €15,000 floor.

Service contracts cross the full procedure threshold at €443,000.

Military construction requires a public tender only above €1 million.

Buyers may bundle several items into one order through 2030.

Direct awards are allowed when only one supplier can meet NATO interoperability rules.

The ministry may limit bids to companies based in the European Union or European Economic Area and demand that a set share of production happens inside those zones.
Parliament kept its long-standing €25 million review line. Every contract above that figure still needs budget-committee clearance. Critics in the opposition argue that the threshold, first fixed in 1981, should rise with inflation. Defense planners defend the ceiling, saying a weekly committee vote will not derail urgent projects as long as paperwork arrives on time.

Oversight groups worry about transparency. A 2022 report from Transparency International warned that the earlier fast-track rules raised corruption risks. The new act tries to answer those fears by demanding that every contract above €10 million be posted to a secure digital portal within ten days, where auditors may inspect price build-ups and delivery milestones. Yet watchdogs say that the federal audit court must hire more staff or face a backlog.

German defense budget growth and industrial impact 2025 – 2029

The federal finance ministry expects defense spending to rise from roughly €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion by 2029. That would raise defense’s share of GDP from 2.4 percent to around 3.5 percent. The increase hinges on a special borrowing window of nearly €400 billion, approved in March after lawmakers relaxed the constitutional debt brake for defense.

Legacy contractors – Rheinmetall, Airbus Defence, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann – welcomed the shift to faster decision cycles. They comment that large bundled orders cut down on red tape for both the buyer and the seller. But smaller firms aren’t as confident. A drone company in Bavaria warned that merging five small unmanned aircraft deals into one big contract “locks us out by default,”. A Berlin-based venture investor agreed. He said raising contract thresholds could shut many niche software and sensor providers out of open bidding.

Financiers point to another pressure point – staffing. The defense ministry promised 900 new procurement positions this year, but hiring has been slow. Several program directors admit that unfilled posts are already dragging down the time savings the law was supposed to bring.

NATO readiness deadlines and procurement priorities for the Bundeswehr

NATO planners have identified 2029 as a major milestone for European readiness, citing trends in Russian rearmament. Berlin locked its modernization calendar to that horizon. Defense ministry insiders listed programs expected to invoke the new law first:

CH-47F Chinook heavy-lift helicopters to replace the aging CH-53G fleet.

Arrow 3 ballistic-missile interceptor batteries bought with Israeli support.

Leopard 2A8 tanks to rebuild armor battalions thinned by transfers to Ukraine.

A Eurofighter electronic-warfare suite that adds an updated emitter location system.

A mixed drone fleet combining medium-altitude surveillance platforms with loitering munitions.
Army leaders are pushing to have the first Leopard 2A8 units ready for action by late 2027-two years ahead of the original schedule. Meanwhile, the air force is targeting fall 2028 to get an Arrow 3 battery up and running, starting the countdown from a contract they plan to sign in early 2026. Defense officials say those dates would be unreachable under the old regime because a single court protest could add fifteen months.

Large contractors welcome bundling for the helicopter deal, which will roll training aids, simulators, and depot support into one package. Start-ups hope the drone architecture stays modular enough to let them sell niche payloads. The law’s direct-award clause for systems that protect NATO interoperability may tilt toward established suppliers, yet ministry lawyers say they will apply that gate only when no credible substitute exists.

The governing coalition holds a clear majority, but last-minute changes are likely. Several Christian Democrat lawmakers push for quota language that reserves at least 20 percent of annual contract value for small-and-medium-size companies. A left-leaning bloc wants tougher auditing before any waiver of EU tender rules. Industry lobbyists, in turn, lobby to extend the bundling waiver beyond 2030, calling five years “too short for shipbuilding cycles.”

The Puma infantry fighting vehicle upgrade slipped three years after a radio protest. Eurofighter’s AESA radar took eight court appeals before the first antenna left the factory. Even routine orders-winter parkas, medical syringes-have crawled. In one case, a batch of diesel generators reached troops eighteen months late because the contracting office waited for eight separate signatures on a single pricing form.

We, at the defense-aerospace editorial team, see that this act gives Berlin real leverage against bureaucratic drift, but money and legal text still need hands, screens, and signed papers. If the ministry hires the promised staff and if Parliament watches the purse, the Bundeswehr stands a fair chance of fielding the hardware NATO wants on the dates commanders promise.

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