German Army Living Hand to Mouth

BERLIN – Germany's armed forces are coming apart at the seams, stretched too far to fulfil a host of new overseas demands and to modernise on a shrinking budget, the head of the armed forces union said.

"The financial situation of the armed forces is desperate. The military is so massively underfunded that there must be consequences ... We're living from hand-to-mouth," Bernhard Gertz, chairman of the German Armed Forces Association, told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has hailed a new post Cold War era of German international involvement in which Germany offers soldiers, not just funds, to peacekeeping efforts and readies its troops for a European rapid reaction force.

Last year, the German military expanded its overseas operations, taking the lead of the Macedonian peace mission and sending troops to the U.S-led conflict in Afghanistan. It now has 10,500 troops abroad, a five-fold increase in three years.

However, Gertz, head of what is effectively a union for German soldiers, says the armed forces are having to work with outdated equipment and are denied the funds necessary to carry out much-vaunted reforms.

"There's been an investment shortfall of 15 billion euros over the past 10 to 12 years, this just for bringing things up-to-date," Gertz said, adding that the military's land vehicles are on average 14-years-old and communications are inadequate. "We are still flying the Bell UH1-D helicopter which was at its prime during the Vietnam War 30 years ago and the Phantom F4, a jet conceived during the Korean War. The Americans got rid of them many years ago," Gertz said. Gertz suggested German troops envied their better-funded British and French counterparts. Germany spends 1.48 percent of its gross domestic product on defence, according to Defence Ministry figures, compared with a European Union average of two percent.