Romania has signed a 5.7-billion-euro defence package with Rheinmetall covering hundreds of new combat vehicles, short-range air defence systems, ammunition and a clutch of patrol and diver-support vessels, in what the German manufacturer has called the largest international contract in its recent history, the company said.
The contracts were awarded on 29 May by Romania’s Directorate General for Armaments and routed through the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) programme, the bloc’s new financing instrument designed to help member states pay for big-ticket defence procurement.
Rheinmetall has said deliveries will begin in 2028 and run through to 2030, that several hundred million euros of fresh investment will flow into Romania to fulfil them, and that the company will lean heavily on its existing Romanian footprint, including its Medias-based subsidiary Rheinmetall Automecanica, while bringing more than two hundred subcontractors into the supply network and creating what it described as thousands of new jobs.
At the centre of the package sits a buy of 298 Lynx vehicles, the latest generation of Rheinmetall’s medium-weight tracked combat platforms. The bulk of those will be armoured personnel carrier variants, alongside mortar-carrier, command-post and medical configurations, giving the Romanian Land Forces a single family of vehicles to handle infantry transport, indirect fire, command and casualty evacuation, all on a common chassis and a common supply chain.
On the air-defence side, Romania has ordered the Skyranger system, Rheinmetall’s mobile short-range turret built to deal with the kind of small drones and low-flying aircraft that have come to dominate the airspace in Ukraine, and which the company is mounting on the same Lynx chassis to keep tracks and turrets in a single line. Until those systems arrive, Rheinmetall has agreed to keep Romania’s existing Gepard anti-aircraft gun vehicles running, providing continuity of cover during the transition, and the package also includes medium-calibre ammunition for the air-defence guns and for the new personnel carriers.
The naval side of the contract,s ay the firm, draws on Rheinmetall’s recently established Naval Systems business, adding two offshore patrol vessels and two diver-support vessels to the Romanian Navy, all built to what the group calls a proven design from that segment.
Image Lukas1325, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
