 The German army faced a shortage of money and weapons. Chancellor Olaf Scholz's 109 billion US dollars cash injection into the German military has yet to reach the barracks where soldiers told the New York Times that they still lack weapons ammunition and working toilets. Within days of Russian troops entering Ukraine last February, Scholz announced that his government would set up a 109 billion dollar fund to modernise Germany's military and would increase defence spending to meet the 2% of GDP threshold mandated by NATO. However, these premises have not been fulfilled. At the German military's artillery school, training exercises are routinely cancelled due to a lack of ammunition and troops have yet to receive replacement for 14 howitzers that were shipped to Ukraine the newspaper reported. Renovations to the school's buildings have been postponed until 2042, meaning that soldiers will have to deal with broken windows, leaking roofs and toilets in such a state of disrepair that they were permanently shut last year. Although the army commissioned its first new artillery battalion in October, it now has only five such battalions compared to 83 at the height of the Cold War. Likewise, while Germany plans on increasing the number of active duty personnel to just over 200,000 by 2030, it had almost half a million men in uniform during the Cold War. Furthermore, the procurement of new weapons promised by Scholz has been stalled by German bureaucracy. For any purchase requests of more than $5,490, military personnel must submit a request to a civilian-run procurement office where staff were previously known to take years to complete orders. We are witnesses of a deception, former colonel Roderick Keisswetter told the newspaper.