A new leadership is necessary for the turning point in the Bundeswehr: Defense Minister Boris Pistorius from the SPD is reorganizing the team at the top of the military department. Lieutenant General Carsten Breuer is to become the new Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, as the German Press Agency learned in Berlin on Monday. The 58-year-old is to succeed General Eberhard Zorn, who took over the post as the highest-ranking soldier in April 2018. State Secretary Margaretha Sudhof, who came to the ministry with the largely unsuccessful ex-minister Christine Lambrecht, is also to vacate her post.
Breuer is currently commander of the new Bundeswehr Territorial Command that he established. His job as head of the Corona crisis team in the Chancellery also attracted public interest. He had taken over the coordination of official measures. Since then he has had close ties to the Chancellery.
At the end of February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was satisfied with the work of the leadership command. He has the impression “that everyone is internally motivated and is now making progress on things that have to be implemented really quickly at a greater pace than was perhaps the case in the past,” said the SPD politician during a visit to the command in the Julius Leber barracks in Berlin.
The Territorial Command has the “operational command of the forces” – including the army, air force, navy, medical service and cyber/information space – in homeland security. This also includes administrative and disaster relief, hybrid threat situations, civil-military cooperation and the coordination of the deployment of allied forces in Germany or the transfer via Germany.
Breuer said in September last year that he wanted to quickly improve the ability to react to targeted destabilization. A “hybrid influence on Germany’s security architecture, i.e. this situation in which you have to say that it’s not quite peace anymore, but it’s not quite war yet” is the “worst case” for the command, said the lieutenant general of the German press agency. He now also has the task of turning the Bundeswehr, which has been neglected for years, into a broadly combat-capable troop.
State Secretary Sudhof has to vacate her chair according to dpa information. The “Spiegel” reported on Monday that Pistorius would install his close confidante Nils Hilmer as State Secretary in the Bendlerblock. The administrative lawyer Sudhof had previously been in the Ministry of Justice under Lambrecht.
