Germany and France to increase defense spending

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has demanded weapons makers increase production to match the country's spending plans, while French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a 64 billion euro ($75 billion) defense allocation for 2027.

In an interview with the Financial Times on the weekend, Pistorius told the weapons industry it must stop complaining and "deliver", after his government had streamlined military procurement worth hundreds of billions of euros.

"There is no reason to complain anymore," he said. "The industry knows perfectly well that it is now responsible for delivering."

The German government, under the leadership of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, is undertaking its largest military budget increase in decades.

The plan involves scaling up annual defense spending to 162 billion euros by 2029, representing a 70 percent rise on the proposed budget for this year, in line with NATO's target of reaching 3.5 percent of GDP for core defense spending.

"Unfortunately, we still experience delays in individual projects, where everything seems settled, and then delays occur on the industry side, which I then have to account for," Pistorius said.

Germany plans to establish long-term contracts with regular purchase commitments to address manufacturers' long-standing complaint that they cannot invest in expensive production lines without guaranteed orders, the FT reported.

Pistorius added: "We need to get faster. We need to become more effective. We need to throw rules overboard when it comes to procurement and planning.

"We need a system that renews itself through continuous deliveries over many years, so that the number of operational tanks always stays the same."

Meanwhile, Macron outlined France's ambitious spending plans to top commanders at the Defense Ministry on Sunday, ahead of Monday's Bastille Day military parade, Reuters reported.

"To be free in this world you must be feared, to be feared you must be powerful," he said. "While we had planned to double the defense budget by 2030, we will double it by 2027.There will be 64 billion euros for defense in 2027, that's twice more than in 2017. It's a new, historic and proportionate effort."

The additional funding would come from "more activity and more production", not borrowing, he said. Details will be outlined when Prime Minister Francois Bayrou presents the 2026 budget on Tuesday, he said.

Urging European unity in weapons procurement, he called for countries to "act together, produce together, buy together", announcing a joint French-German defense and security council meeting next month when "new decisions will have to be made".