(Procurement; 05-03; p.4)

Besides, the special situation of the German social institutions should not be left unmentioned as draftees may object to serving in the armed forces for conscientious reasons.
Thus, employers in the social sector can dispose of quite inexpensive employees, and they welcome them. The Minister of Defence's announcement alone, to renounce draftees below a certain level of fitness, provoked critique of some of those employers, since they see the further delivery of their services in danger. - Facts, actually irrelevant for defence so could be one of the not named reasons for sticking to conscription.

 

Structure and abilities

As mentioned, future operations of the Bundeswehr will be more in the fields of crisis prevention and crisis intervention. In line with that is to divide the armed forces in one part for territorial defence and another for the cited scenarios.
While the first will if at all be operate to help out in case of domestic catastrophes - and in such cases not as weapons bearing personnel -, operations of the latter are highly probable. Accordingly, the Bundeswehr needs re-structuring: on the one hand, we will have professionally trained and equipped operational forces, and on the other, present forces which are justified mainly by providing a "security cushion" for territorial defence (cf. par 16 of the DPG).

In the 15th and the 92nd to 94th paragraph of the DPG is laid down which capabilities are relevant for the operational forces, what, in consequence, are primary procurement goals. - To come to an adequate reasoning about the following, it is useful to know that the defence budget is limited to about 25 billion Euro for years, money for procurement thus has to be saved elsewhere; expenditures for personnel account for roughly one half of the budget and this limit shall not be exceeded in the years to come, too.

The most visible item to procure probably is a European transport plane; it will render the demanded capabilities of "mobility" (15th par of the DPG) and "strategic deployment" (92nd par of the DPG).
The contractor - the EADS company which on the German side is represented by a branch of Daimler-Chrysler, called DASA, of which in turn a branch called MTU delivers the engines of the plane - has agreed to build sixty A-400M planes for Germany, adding up to 8.3 billion Euro. Since the plane is just in its development phase, the delivery of the first items will not start before 2010 - up to then, one will lease planes of other nations or suppliers. (read on here)