Ukraine war pressure is reshaping Germany’s high-tech defense industry

BERLIN — Germany’s high-tech defense firms are adapting their business practices amid the war in Ukraine, replacing the sector’s boutique approach with a greater focus on mass production, according to company officials.

The key factor now tends to be speed, officials said. How soon systems can be delivered and combat-ready trumps clients’ requests for custom tailoring.

“We have seen a fundamental change in our production philosophy,” Lothar Belz, company spokesperson for German sensor manufacturer Hensoldt , said. This stems in large part from the increased demand, he said. While in the past Hensoldt usually delivered fewer than five large radars per year, those numbers have now risen to over 15 annually. By 2025, the cadence is expected to be 20 per year, according to Belz.

Output from certain departments – such as remote sensing and electronic warfare – has increased threefold since the “Zeitenwende,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s famous turn of phrase describing a continent no longer deemed at peace following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

About half of Hensoldt’s radar production is destined for Kyiv this year, Belz said.

It’s an example how “Zeitenwende” – which translates into something like turning point or watershed moment – is slowly seeping into Germany’s defense policy and industry apparatus.

The term also came with a financial component, most notably a €100 billion cash infusion to the German armed forces and a pledge to raise annual defense spending past the NATO target of 2% of GDP for the coming years. Scholz has called the measures “the most far-reaching change in German security policy since the Bundeswehr was founded in 1955.”

Zeitenwende zeitgeist

Companies are feeling the time crunch. “We definitely had orders where the customer said: ‘At the end of the day, we don’t care about the exact color scheme that much,’” said Pitt Marx, spokesperson of Thales Germany. He explained that contracts previously were usually signed with some breathing room when it came to the production timeline. Now, the company has had to “bundle capacities” and assign some employees to projects they would not usually work on to meet objectives.

Thales’ customers receive their orders quicker than they would have a few years ago, Marx said. Similarly, at Hensoldt, radars are now delivered typically “within a year” of the contract, though exact timing still depends on “adaptation necessities,” Belz said.

To meet the new demands, Hensoldt has added a new shift and increased the size of its production staff by 15% in the past two years.

Strong hiring is happening throughout the industry. German radio specialist Rohde & Schwarz added almost 2,000 new employees, and the company also added a third shift, according to spokesperson Dennis-Peter Merklinghaus.

At Hensoldt, the dictate of the Zeitenwende has affected everything, ranging from production – “we now do industrial serial production,” Belz said – to the supply of components and even the handling of testing and the handoff of finished systems to customers.

Thales’ Marx said that when it came to delivery and the training of workers, the company had become “more pragmatic,” a term used frequently in several interviews conducted for this story to denote that certain standards had to be softened to make mission.

“There is a fundamental difference in whether you are ordering something to keep an eye on your border, or whether you’re deploying it right into an active warzone,” he said.

Radar systems like Thales' Ground Master 200 (GM200) , shown here deployed in Romania, are in high demand in the aftermath of Russia's Ukraine invasion. (Photo by Danial Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images)

Pandemic aftershocks

Meanwhile, the industry is still feeling the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, whose supply chain disruptions never quite went away. It was mentioned as a concern in every interview Defense News conducted for this story.

For Rohde & Schwarz, retaining control of needed components has paid dividends, keeping deliveries on time even during the height of the global health crisis. “We can build everything from the smallest chips to ordinary server racks ourselves and do so within Germany,” Merklinghaus said.

Hensoldt’s Belz also emphasized the importance of supply chains. His company has made new investments in logistics, building a new warehouse and distribution center. This would have been unthinkable in the past, as the company would order components as they became necessary for the fulfillment of contracts. Now, it maintains stocks of crucial parts. In early December, Hensoldt announced the acquisition of the electronics and logistics company ESG.

The greater need for speed may also require customers to recalibrate their expectations. In the past, it was common practice for government buyers to provide hundreds of pages and thousands of bullet points of individualized wishes for a contract, and even to change the requirements while production was already running, said Belz.

The shift toward producing larger quantities in shorter amounts of time “requires a thorough understanding of operational requirements on our part but also a certain amount of restraint from the customer,” he said. Not all those interviewed shared this philosophy but Hensoldt believes it’s the right move for a new era, the spokesperson said.

After all, he said, the key to success in the new, fast-paced world of European high-tech defense companies is “not just being willing to deliver, but being able to.”

Linus Höller is Defense News' Europe correspondent and OSINT investigator. He reports on the arms deals, sanctions, and geopolitics shaping Europe and the world. He holds master’s degrees in WMD nonproliferation, terrorism studies, and international relations, and works in four languages: English, German, Russian, and Spanish.

柏林——据公司官员称，在乌克兰战争期间，德国高科技国防公司正在调整其商业做法，用更加注重大规模生产的方式取代该行业的精品式经营模式。

官员们表示，现在的关键因素往往是速度。系统交付和投入作战的速度比客户提出的定制化要求更重要。

德国传感器制造商亨索尔特（Hensoldt）的发言人洛塔尔·贝尔茨（Lothar Belz）表示：“我们的生产理念发生了根本性的转变。” 他说，这主要源于市场需求的增长。过去，亨索尔特每年交付的大型雷达通常不足五部，而现在这一数字已超过每年十五部。贝尔茨预计，到2025年，年产量将达到二十部。

自“时代转变”（Zeitenwende）以来，某些部门（如遥感和电子战部门）的产出增加了三倍。“时代转变”是德国总理奥拉夫·朔尔茨用来形容俄罗斯入侵乌克兰后，欧洲大陆不再被认为处于和平状态的著名短语。

贝尔兹表示，亨索尔特公司今年生产的雷达产品中约有一半将销往基辅。

这是一个“Zeitenwende”（意为转折点或分水岭时刻）如何逐渐渗透到德国国防政策和工业体系中的一个例子。

该协议还包含财政方面的措施，最引人注目的是向德国武装部队注资1000亿欧元，并承诺在未来几年内将年度国防开支提高到北约规定的占GDP 2%的目标以上。朔尔茨称这些措施是“自1955年德国联邦国防军成立以来，德国安全政策影响最为深远的变革”。

Zeitenwende zeitgeist

各公司都感受到了时间紧迫的压力。“我们确实遇到过这样的订单：客户说：‘说到底，我们并不太在意具体的配色方案，’”泰雷兹德国公司发言人皮特·马克思说道。他解释说，以往签订的合同在生产时间表方面通常会留有一定的余地。而现在，为了完成目标，公司不得不“整合产能”，并将一些员工调派到他们通常不会参与的项目上。

马克思表示，泰雷兹公司的客户现在收到订单的速度比几年前快得多。贝尔兹也表示，亨索尔特公司的雷达现在通常在合同签订后“一年内”交付，但具体时间仍取决于“调整的必要性”。

为了满足新的需求，亨索尔特在过去两年中增加了一个新班次，并将生产人员规模扩大了 15%。

整个行业都在大力招聘。据发言人丹尼斯-彼得·默克林豪斯 (Dennis-Peter Merklinghaus) 称，德国无线电专家罗德与施瓦茨公司新增了近 2000 名员工，并增设了第三班。

在亨索尔特，时代转型的影响波及方方面面，从生产——“我们现在进行工业化批量生产，”贝尔茨说——到零部件供应，甚至包括测试处理和将成品系统交付给客户。

泰勒斯公司的马克思表示，在交付和工人培训方面，公司变得“更加务实”，这个词在为报道此事进行的几次采访中经常被使用，表示为了完成使命，某些标准不得不放宽。

他说：“如果你是为了监视边境而下令部署某种东西，或者将其直接部署到战区，这两者之间有着根本的区别。”

俄罗斯入侵乌克兰后，泰雷兹公司的地面大师200（GM200）雷达系统（如图所示，部署在罗马尼亚）需求量很大。（图片来源：Danial Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images）

疫情余震

与此同时，该行业仍在承受新冠疫情的余波，其供应链中断问题从未完全消失。在《防务新闻》为撰写本文而进行的所有采访中，这都被提及为一个令人担忧的问题。

对于罗德与施瓦茨公司而言，掌控所需零部件带来了丰厚的回报，即使在全球健康危机最严重的时候，也能保证按时交付。“从最小的芯片到普通的服务器机架，我们都能自主生产，而且全部都在德国境内完成，”默克林豪斯说道。

亨索尔特公司的贝尔茨也强调了供应链的重要性。该公司已在物流领域进行了新的投资，新建了仓库和配送中心。这在过去是不可想象的，因为当时公司只能在履行合同需要时才订购零部件。而现在，公司会储备关键零部件。12月初，亨索尔特宣布收购电子物流公司ESG。

对速度的更高需求也可能迫使客户重新调整预期。贝尔兹表示，过去，政府采购人员通常会提供数百页、数千条的个性化合同要求，甚至在生产进行过程中更改要求。

他表示，向更大规模、更短时间内生产更多产品的转变“既需要我们对运营需求有透彻的了解，也需要客户有一定的克制”。发言人称，并非所有受访者都认同这种理念，但亨索尔特认为这是新时代正确的举措。

他表示，毕竟，在瞬息万变的欧洲高科技国防公司新世界中，成功的关键“不仅在于愿意交付，更在于能够交付”。

林努斯·霍勒是《防务新闻》的欧洲记者和开源情报调查员。他报道影响欧洲乃至全球的军火交易、制裁和地缘政治。他拥有大规模杀伤性武器不扩散、恐怖主义研究和国际关系三个硕士学位，并精通英语、德语、俄语和西班牙语四种语言。