The German military procurement official said that the German army has three years to acquire the weapons and military equipment necessary to "counter a potential Russian attack on NATO countries."
"We must have everything necessary to be fully prepared to defend the country by 2028," Annette Lenigk-Emden, head of the Federal Office for Military Procurement, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin.
Lenigke added that the army should have all the necessary equipment a year in advance because "the soldiers still have to train to use it."
She expressed confidence in achieving this thanks to the facilitation of military equipment purchases and the hundreds of billions of euros allocated by the new Friedrich Merz government for defense spending.
She added that her office will submit military equipment procurement proposals to the House of Representatives by the end of the year, with "priority given to heavy equipment such as Sky Ranger anti-aircraft tanks or the model that will replace the Fuchs armored transport vehicle."
For his part, German Army Inspector General Carsten Breuer recently claimed that Russia may be capable of "launching a large-scale attack on NATO territory by 2029."
Friedrich Merz has made rearming the long-underfunded German military a priority for his coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with the goal of becoming "the strongest conventional army in Europe."
