Germany’s authorised defence expenditure has grown to a level at which the headline figure has stopped being a useful planning input for anyone outside the system. A supplier deciding whether to open a German subsidiary, qualify a component or bid for a framework needs to know something narrower than the headline: how much of that authority turns into a contract that an undertaking not already inside the programme can win, when the opportunity becomes visible, and what has to be true of the bidder on the day the participation deadline closes. Those are different questions from how much money parliament has voted, and the German record answers them separately. The budget establishes a ceiling on commitments and payments; the execution channel determines which organisations convert that ceiling into cash; procurement law determines whether conversion happens through a competition at all; and the eligibility architecture of the individual procedure determines who is admitted to the competitions that do take place. Each of those filters is documented in German public sources, each narrows the accessible volume, and none of them is visible in a spending total. The question, then, is where in the German system as it stands in November 2026 authorised defence expenditure becomes contestable demand, and what a European supplier can and cannot establish about its size.