page_title: Ursula von der Leyen
section_title: Military procurement
hierarchical_section_title: Ursula von der Leyen / Political career / Federal Minister, 2005–2019 / Minister of Defence, 2013–2019 / Military procurement
caption_attribution_description: U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen review German soldiers at the Ministry of Defense in Berlin, June 22, 2015. Carter is in Europe to meet with European defense ministers and participate in his first NATO ministerial as defense secretary.
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: Early in her tenure, von der Leyen pledged to get a grip on Germany’s military equipment budget after publishing a KPMG report on repeated failures in controlling suppliers, costs and delivery deadlines, e.g., with the Airbus A400M Atlas transport plane, Eurofighter Typhoon jet and the Boxer armoured fighting vehicle.
  In 2015, von der Leyen publicly criticized Airbus over delays in the delivery of A400M military transport planes, complaining that the company had a serious problem with product quality. Under her leadership, the ministry agreed to accept 13 million euros in compensation for delays in deliveries of both the second and third A400M aircraft. In 2016, she asked for an additional 12.7 million euros in damages for delays in the delivery of a fourth plane. Also in 2015, von der Leyen chose MBDA, jointly owned by Airbus, Britain's BAE Systems, and Italy's Leonardo S.p.A., to build the Medium Extended Air Defense System, but set strict milestones for it to retain the contract.
caption: Ursula von der Leyen with US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (2015 in Berlin)
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