page_title: Ursula von der Leyen
section_title: Armed forces reform
hierarchical_section_title: Ursula von der Leyen / Political career / Federal Minister, 2005–2019 / Minister of Defence, 2013–2019 / Armed forces reform
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Ursula von der Leyen während der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz 2017
context_page_description: Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German politician and the president of the European Commission since 1 December 2019. She served in the federal government of Germany from 2005 to 2019 as the longest-serving member of Angela Merkel's cabinet. She is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its EU counterpart, the European People's Party.
  She was born and raised in Brussels to German parents; her father Ernst Albrecht was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French. She moved to Hanover in 1971, when her father entered politics to become Minister President of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. As an economics student at the London School of Economics in the late 1970s, she lived under the name Rose Ladson, the family name of her American great-grandmother from Charleston, South Carolina. After graduating as a physician from the Hannover Medical School in 1987, she specialized in women's health. In 1986 she married fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen of the noble von der Leyen family of silk merchants.
context_section_description: In 2014, von der Leyen introduced a €100 million plan to make the Bundeswehr more attractive to recruits, including by offering crèches for soldiers’ children, limiting postings to match school term dates, and considerable rises in hardship allowances for difficult postings. After Bundeswehr officials failed to properly investigate persistent reports of brutal hazing rituals, sexual humiliation, and bullying in military training, von der Leyen fired the army's training commander, Major General Walter Spindler, in 2017.
  In 2015, as a result of severe NATO–Russian tensions in Europe, Germany announced a significant increase in defence spending. In May 2015, the German government approved an increase in defence spending, at the time 1.3% of GDP, by 6.2% over the following five years, allowing the Ministry of Defense to modernize the army fully. Plans were also announced to significantly expand the tank fleet to a potential number of 328, order 131 more Boxer armoured personnel carriers, increase the submarine fleet, and to develop a new fighter jet to replace the Tornado. Germany considered increasing the size of the army, and in May 2016 von der Leyen announced it would spend €130 billion on new equipment by 2030 and add nearly 7,000 soldiers by 2023 in the first German military expansion since the end of the Cold War. In February 2017, the German government announced another expansion, which would increase the number of its professional soldiers by 20,000 by 2024.
caption: von der Leyen during the MSC 2017
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