‘Deter aggressors’: Germany’s Scholz calls to ramp up arms production in EU

Europe must ramp up production of armaments massively and urgently, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Monday, warning that the continent now "does not live in times of peace".

Published: 12 February 2024 16:40 CET

Chancellor Olaf Scholz visits the Rheinmetall factory on Monday. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Philipp Schulze

Speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony for Rheinmetall’s new munitions factory, Scholz said European nations must pool together orders and financing to provide the defence industry with purchase guarantees for the next decades.

“This is urgently necessary because the painful reality is that we do not live in times of peace,” he said, pointing to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

“We must move from manufacturing to mass production of armaments,” he said, arguing that “those who want peace must be able to successfully deter aggressors”.

Weighed down by its militaristic past, Germany has in recent decades been circumspect about its defence forces and armaments industry.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 upended Berlin’s post-World War II pacifist tendencies, and forced its transformation into a proponent of heavy rearmament.

Germany is now Ukraine’s second biggest weapons contributor, and Scholz has been vocal in pushing other EU nations to give more.

What happens in Ukraine will decide “if our peace order, our rules-based world has a future,” said Scholz, adding that Russia must “fail with the attempt to swallow its neighbour by force”.

‘Rather empty’

The chancellor also reiterated that armaments pledges from other EU nations for Ukraine were still insufficient.

The EU has set up a joint financing mechanism to meet Ukrainian demand for weapons, but the bloc has struggled to make good on promised deliveries.

Brussels pledged to provide a million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2024, but the EU last week admitted it can only produce just over half that by the deadline.

Scholz underlined that it was key to shift gears from years of under-investment in the defence sector to building up much-needed production capacity.

“Tanks, howitzers, helicopters and air defence systems are not lined up on the shelves. If nothing is ordered for years, then nothing is produced,” he warned.

Rheinmetall’s new factory in Unterluess is scheduled to begin production in 2025 with an initial production run of 50,000 shells a year, before progressively reaching its full annual capacity of 200,000.

Putting the volume in perspective, Scholz said that thousands of shells are fired on a daily basis at the frontlines in Ukraine currently.

In addition, the German army’s own weapons store was “rather empty” even before the war.

Rheinmetall’s boss Armin Papperger said the aim of the new factory is to help secure Germany’s “strategic sovereignty in the large-calibre ammunition domain”.

The company is aiming to churn out up to 500,000 shells this year overall, a seven-fold jump from the 70,000 annual production before the Ukraine war.

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Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the surface-to-air system was part of a build-up of German and European defences launched after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the Ukraine invasion in 2022.

“Russia has been massively rearming for many years, especially in the field of rockets and cruise missiles,” Scholz said at the inauguration ceremony at a base in Todendorf near the northern city of Hamburg.

Putin had broken disarmament treaties and “deployed missiles as far as Kaliningrad”, a Russian exclave located some 530 kilometres (330 miles) from Berlin, he added.

“It would be negligent not to respond to this appropriately,” the chancellor said. “A failure to act would put peace at risk. I will not allow that.”

Scholz, who was joined by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, said the system was part of the European Sky Shield Initiative, which also includes long-range defences against ballistic missiles.

The German military has ordered six of the Iris-T SLM systems at a total cost of 950 million euros ($1 million) from manufacturer Diehl Defence, to be delivered by May 2027.

Iris-T success in Ukraine

Germany, the second-largest contributor of military aid to Ukraine after the United States, has already supplied four Iris-T SLM systems to Ukraine and pledged another eight.

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov was visiting Germany on Wednesday, a day after a Russian missile attack killed at least 51 people in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, one of the single deadliest bombardments of the war.

The Iris-T systems sent to Ukraine feature truck-mounted launchers that fire missiles to intercept aerial threats at a range of up to 40 kilometres (25 miles).

Scholz said that “in Ukraine, Iris-T has shot down over 250 rockets, drones and cruise missiles to date and saved countless lives”.

The German leader said that Europe, aside from defensive systems, would also need more precision missiles of its own “so that there is no dangerous gap with Russia in this strategically important field”.

In July, Washington and Berlin announced that the “episodic deployments” of long-range US missiles, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, to Germany would begin in 2026.

Scholz stressed that “our sole concern is to deter potential attackers. Every attack on us must mean a risk for the attacker. Our concern is to secure peace here and prevent war, and nothing else.”