More Bad News from Germany: The Rise of the Fantasy General
Germany's new head of ground forces is an excitable YouTube influencer who gets every prediction wrong but knows what to say to please his superiors and the mainstream media
Let’s face it: For outside observers, who are not getting a direct boost to career and income, promotions inside ministries can be about as exciting as trainspotting on an abandoned railway branch. But this time is different: Recent changes at the German Ministry of Defense matter, if in a disturbing way. Berlin’s energetic, ambitious, popular, and resolutely narrow-minded minister of defense Boris Pistorius has just made some high-level personnel moves.
By far the single most politically significant of Pistorius’s new appointments is that of Major-General Christian Freuding as the new “Heeresinspekteur,” the head the land forces (in German: Heer), that is, the army in the strict sense of the term. This is a position of major influence because of the structure of Germany’s military and current rearmament plans, both with a key role for the army. Formally, Freuding has not (yet) scored the highest possible military rank. That would be the “Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr,” responsible for all four current service branches (army, navy, air force, and the new cyber and information units).
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