Lieutenant General Carsten Breuer will be the next highest-ranking soldier of the Bundeswehr. It is common for the position Chief of Defence to be filled when there is a change of government and it was clearly a sign of appreciation that the actual Chief of Defence, General Eberhard Zorn, survived the last change of government for over a year.
Lieutenant General Breuer proved his abilities in recent crises, first as advisor to the Chancellor’s Office on the Corona pandemic and then as the first commander of the newly established Territorial Command of the Bundeswehr (TerrFüKdoBw). He thus stands for a holistic approach to the defence of Germany that includes not only the military but also crisis and disaster response forces. In his last assignments he demonstrated his organisational talent and the ability to unite a wide variety of actors towards one goal. As commander of the TerrFüKdoBw, Lieutenant General Breuer had to take the entire federal structure into account, as he described in an interview with Behörden Spiegel in November 2022.
“Defence is a sovereign task – we counter an outside aggressor,” Lieutenant General Breuer emphasised in the interview. “Our mission as Bundeswehr is about a unified approach to an existential threat that we as a state might have to face – that’s exactly what national and alliance defence is for. We in the Territorial Command ensure the national command capability. From subsidiary assistance to host nation support, from deployment to territorial defence, to robust national defence.”
Dorothee Frank, Head of editorial team