The German government should purchase the country’s state-of-the-art IRIS-T air defense systems to ensure national security instead of just handing them over to its “partners,” Markus Soeder, the head of the southeastern German state of Bavaria, said on Sunday. Earlier this week, Germany sent the first of such systems to Ukraine.
It is high time that Germany thought about its own security, Soeder said in an interview with the Sunday edition of the German tabloid Bild. “We have to deploy missile and air defense systems to German cities,” he said, adding that this would allow the military to have “a complex protective shield over Germany.”
“It is not enough to just protect our partners; we have to do the same for our own country,” Soeder, who is also the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union party, said.
The comments come after Berlin delivered the first of its long-promised air defense systems to Ukraine. Federal government officials have not yet commented on Soeder’s remarks.
The IRIS-T SLM is a ground-based air defense system capable of intercepting incoming missiles at an altitude of up to 20km and a distance of up to 40km, according to German media. Chancellor Olaf Scholz previously said it can protect “an entire city” from air raids.
Scholz vowed to provide Ukraine with these systems in June, and the first shipment was initially slated for November. A total of four units consisting of a command vehicle, radar vehicle, and a truck-mounted launcher are now scheduled to arrive in Ukraine sometime in 2023. German magazine Der Spiegel earlier claimed that the remaining three units promised by Berlin had not yet been manufactured.
Some media outlets have reported that Kiev requested at least a dozen of these air defense systems and offered to purchase them directly from the manufacturer, Diehl Defense.
Also in June, the German Defense Ministry stated that the nation’s own military does not possess the ground-based version of the air defense system that Scholz promised to Kiev. The only IRIS-T systems it does have in its arsenal are air-to-air missiles mounted on its Eurofighter and Tornado fighters.