Germany will not acquire more Puma armoured personnel carriers, for now, the Social Democratic Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht said after all 18 tanks purchased to contribute to a NATO taskforce broke down during an exercise on Monday.
Every single one of the 18 newly acquired Puma tanks broke down during a military exercise over the weekend meant to prepare Germany’s participation in NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) from January.
“As long as the vehicle has not proven its stability, we will not give it another go,” Lambrecht said after a crisis meeting on Monday.
To still honour its NATO commitments, Germany will now deploy Marder tanks, which have been in use for decades, to the task force instead, a Defence Ministry spokesperson told public broadcaster ARD.
The news comes days after the German parliament approved the first billions out of the special defence fund announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz after the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine back in February – including funds for upgrades to Puma tanks.
Meanwhile, parliamentarians from the ranks of the governing coalition criticised Lambrecht’s handling of the incident.
It is “highly irritating that the parliament first learned of the new problems with the Puma from the press and was not promptly informed by the defence ministry,” Green lawmakers Niklas Wagener and Sebastian Schäfer, both members of the parliament’s budget committee, said in a statement.
The episode, which Lambrecht called a “bitter blow,” is the latest in a series of blunders for a defence minister regularly accused of misconduct and insufficient knowledge of defence policy issues.
(Julia Dahm | EURACTIV.de)
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