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Is it just me or should the primary qualification for Defense Minister overseeing a 100 billion investment be competence rather than gender? I’m not German but this article keeps referencing the pressure Olaf is feeling to select another woman. Wouldn’t the pressure (in these times) be to pick the right person?
I'm not familiar with the German system, but I would guess not. Government departments often have a separation between career and political leadership. Career leadership consists of professionals selected for competence. The minister is a politician selected for political considerations. There may also be some political staff who serve the minister directly and are familiar with the subject matter.
When a government coalition is formed, each party gets some specific positions, and it's generally free to choose who to appoint. Within each party, gender balance and geographic balance tend to be important, as the voters are otherwise likely to punish the party in the next elections. Some people also have personal priority, for example because they are in the party leadership or they reliably bring in a lot of votes.
Not all minister positions are equal. Some (such as those dealing with economics, finances, and foreign policy) are important, while others (such as education and culture) tend to be low status. Top positions go to high-priority people, while low-status positions are often given to people with specific combinations of traits.
Defense has been a low-status position in Germany, largely due to political culture shaped by losing WW2.
A bit more than half of the population is women.
Unless you're assuming that women are by nature less competent, narrowing to half of the population either includes the best candidate or at least one infinitesimally close to the best candidate with ridiculously high probability.
So what's the harm exactly?
The benefit is that we actually end up with some diversity, instead of the usual old-white-guy club that most of the West defaults to in leadership positions.
Is diversity for it's own sake worth it? If they were to say - "We have a candidate with a bold new vision for the armed forces of Germany; they bring things to the table unlike anyone else - plus they're a woman."
My response would be that that's great but I don't see what the plus part is bringing to the table.
I'm slightly more familiar with the U.S. side of things and clearly woman get the shaft - mainly because senior positions tend to pull from areas (fighter pilots and SOF for example) where the applicability of those particular experiences to command compared to other areas is at least questionable.
I think the answer to that problem is to see if the premise - running around in the boondocks leading a platoon in extremely high pressure situations or flying an F-35 off a carrier deck is relevant experience for a 4 star general or admiral - is true or if there's not equally or more relevant areas of expertise. Not - let's have people with different experiences because it's different.
> Is diversity for it's own sake worth it?
Probably. Even if the decisions made are 100% the same, or at least equivalently valuable, it has benefits throughout society because it makes people everywhere feel more included, and it gives children the idea that they too can do what they want.
If you're a woman or person of color or etc. and relatively _nobody_ in leadership positions has anything like your life experience, and none of them look anything like you, what does that do for either your impression of how the organization aligns with your interests, or your desire to try for a career in whatever organization? Nothing good.
> If they were to say - "We have a candidate with a bold new vision for the armed forces of Germany; they bring things to the table unlike anyone else - plus they're a woman."
Those are not completely unconnected things. If your baseline is 100% old white men, someone who is not in at least one of those categories is likely to have different approaches and ideas that may be worth considering.
So your question is a bit problematic to answer honestly, because it explicitly assumes that the diversity of experience part is 100% divorced from the diversity of thought part.
I believe the quotas were agreed with partner parties during the coalition negotiations. Maybe they're even set in stone in the coalition contract.
Which is a stupid idea to begin with. If you have equally qualified people, fine, pick by gender, but don't make gender the primary criterion. But they thought this through as well as the train wreck that gender neutral language is.
Well, yes, but you shouldn't be making gender the secondary or tertiary criterion either.
Doesn't German already have a grammatical neuter?
German has Genus and Sexus, grammatical and natural sex. Das Mädchen means girl, grammatically it is neuter but naturally of course feminine. The main issue is that many job titles are grammatically masculine - der Lehrer, teacher - and there is a derived variant for women - die Lehrerin, female teacher - but none for man, in which case the generic term - der Lehrer - is reused. So they came up with the idea to always writer der/die Lehrer*in because der Lehrer could be understood as generic but also as masculine. Or some variant of this, they can not even agree on how exactly it should be written or spoken.
The much more sane way to do it would be to just drop the female variant and retrain people over time to no longer infer a natural sex from the grammatical sex. We even already do this in cases where there are no natural sex specific variants, der Mensch means human, grammatically masculine but no one derives from that that we are talking about a man. Die Leiche means corpse, grammatically feminin but no one derives from that that we are talking about a woman. And if you really have to differentiate, then you can always use adjectives, der weibliche Lehrer, der männliche Lehrer, the female teacher, the male teacher.
Yeah, but you can't just refer to people as "Das", it would be like referring to them as "it" in English (i.e. it sounds like you're talking about an object rather than a person).
Scholz himself has set the goal to have gender parity. He simply could choose not to adhere to that. The worst that could happen is some internal criticism from his party.
On the other hand, the MoD has been the red-haired stepchild of ministries in Germany for a long time, especially when left-wing parties control the government. You could almost think that they are intentionally trying to sabotage it by putting people in charge who are completely unqualified. Lambrecht is just the latest example of that. Then again, Merkel didn't do much better.
Lambrecht's direct predecessor under the Merkel administration was not much different. Her predecessor became President of the European Commission after Merkel had to get her out of dodge due to a scandal that had resulted in a parliamentary inquiry.
Her predecessor made decisions that were directly responsible for a lack of spare parts as well as a failed programme for developing the "Euro Hawk" drone.
His predecessor's political career was ended by a plagiarism scandal involving his PhD thesis.
And so on...
> red-haired
I know it's innocous and unintended, but using this expression causes all kinds of problems to red-haired kids (I imagine as an adult you can get fed up with some references, too).
So what. I'm left-handed and survived all the references to anything "left" [1] being bad. From "two left hands" to "sinister" ("left" in Latin), from "the left-hand path" for those who are of the devil to the fact that "dexterity" derives from "dexter" ("right" in Latin), someone who is skilled with both hands is "ambidextrous" ("both right hands") while a clumsy person is "ambisinistrous" ("both left hands"), etcetera. Did I suffer from this? Nope, I'm in good company and fine the way I am. Same for red-haired kids, they'll come out fine and are in good company. Trying to protect them by playing the speech police is not just bloody irritating but it also does them a disservice since they´ll have to enter the big bad world eventually where there are no hdjjhhvvhga's to tell off the nasty people who say mean things to them.
[1] apart from politics where the situation is oddly enough reversed
It's like the saying 'scott-free.' No one intends it to denigrate anyone except for the subject of the sentence. The great majority of these saying have pretty much lost all connection to their origins but people keep insisting on resuscitating them and will take offence on behalf of a perceived offended person. No one really believes all red-headed children are the result of an illicit relationship.
Shut up Ron, you got the nicest girl in the school.
> Scholz is said to favour Lars Klingbeil, the leader of the Social Democrats – Scholz’s own party – who comes from a military family, though the pressure he will be under to choose a woman makes this less likely.
This is probably one of the most high profile cases showing that gender quotas are not a magic bullet.
Comes from a 'military family' doesn't really sound like a qualification, did he not serve in the military at all? Because it would seem like you would lead with ones own qualifications and not of his family.
Ihe US equivalent of this role is currently held by a retired general.
> Ihe US equivalent of this role is currently held by a retired general.
Note that in the US, this is recognized as a particular danger undermining the principle of civilian control, which is why a SoD from the military must be retired 7 years (formerly 10, this has been weakened) or have, in addition to Senate confirmation, a Congressional waiver.
Credentials and experience matter. I’m sure there are qualified German women who know how the military works but she was not one of them
> After repeated admissions that she did not understand the army’s ranking system, Lambrecht came under fire more recently after a clumsy and technically poor new year’s address on Instagram from her rooftop in which she could barely be heard above the noise of exploding fireworks in central Berlin.
Forget about "Credentials", "experience", "qualified", etc. A 90th-percentile high school kid could do better than she did.
How many civilians know about the army's ranking system? I'd bet a lot less than 10% of them, maybe not even 1%. I'd wager you need at least some army experience in order to be familiar with army ranks.
Poor addresses happen all the time, and is more likely to be because of the PR/marketing/production team rather than her (lack of) military/army experience.
> I'd wager you need at least some army experience in order to be familiar with army ranks.
I would wager against that. I am pretty sure almost all of the army ranks can be found fairly easy online, and the information that is classified is something a minister of defense has access to read up on.
As with almost everything else this is about priority. How much votes/internal party power will they get by spending time on etikett vs doing other aspects of the job. Politicians rarely get rewarded simply for doing a good job where their department are effective in budget spending and produce long term results in 10-20 years.
> I would wager against that. I am pretty sure almost all of the army ranks can be found fairly easy online, and the information that is classified is something a minister of defense has access to read up on.
Sure, but how many civilians actually have enough interest (in Germany no less, not the US) to look that up and memorize it? How many of those that do have enough interest to look it up and memorize it, are high school kids?
I agree that it is stupid she didn't know it, as soon as she got the position, she should have looked it up if she didn't already know it. Obviously, in order to even be considered to the position in the first place, she should have known it.
> How many civilians know about the army's ranking system?
How many of them are the head of the military and have a giant amount of staff available to help them in that role?
Parent said "A 90th-percentile high school kid" would know better, they tend to not be neither head of the military nor have giant amount of staff to help.
> A 90th-percentile high school kid could do better ...
(Italics added.)
I assumed that the HS kid knew how to read, was willing to learn basic facts, could judge whether a video was too low-quality to post on Instagram, etc.
I understood that to mean "do her job better than she did". The staff comes with the job, as does the training, I'm sure we'd give that to highschoolers as well, if we make them the head of the armed forces.
> I'd wager you need at least some army experience in order to be familiar with army ranks.
Maybe there is some deep mystery in Germany, but I was generally familiar with the rank systems in the US for all the uniformed services under DoD before having direct experience with them. Seems pretty common, IME.
In any case, while I don't think its a minimum qual to be appointed to such a position, you’d think its something you’d pick up quickly preparing for it.
They are, they are just in the wrong party.
Quite rare to see, both in politics and professional environments, an "incompetent" person that admits they're struggling and they're not up for the task.
Reminds me of the very common phenomenon of managers climbing the career ladder until they reach their "peak incompetence", often with disastrous effects.
Quite a few people I know have deliberately stopped climbing the ladder because they decided senior roles were not for them. Not only that, I often see people decline promotions because they think that they will not be able to do what's needed due to imposter syndrome (or good old fashioned low confidence & self esteem) when I think that actually they'd do a very good job.
It's also not widely appreciated that many senior roles are basically unwinnable. What I mean is that no matter how good the manager is they are destined to repeated failures because the job is stacked against them. The thing is to have people doing these jobs who mitigate the damage and manage the fall out effectively. This is often perceived as incompetence by other in the organisation when it really isn't.
The major issue is that as you move up the ladder, the specific types of skills you need change. Being a good problem solver doesn't make you a good people manager nor a good budget planner, etc. Even if someone had the skills they needed for the higher level position, that doesn't mean they would enjoy it to the same degree as what they chose to seek a position in. More often then not, the pay bump of a promotion is the consolation for taking on a much worse job.
> Reminds me of the very common phenomenon of managers climbing the career ladder until they reach their "peak incompetence", often with disastrous effects.
Stop calling me out.
You're refering to the Peter principle, though combined with the common imposter syndrome, it's quite hard from the inside of yourself to figure out whether you are at the Peter stage of your career or just think that someone will figure out that you are an imposter while actually doing a good job.
It's commendable to have enough self-awareness to recognise it happening to you.
A few years ago I was promoted to a high-level director position, and even though I thought I was doing a good job, I hated every second of it and felt I was way above my head. I definitely learned the lesson that managing people is just not for me. That was my peak incompetence level.
Now, either I get paid to write code, or to design systems on a hammock and have someone else build them. Just don't make me manage anything.
> very common phenomenon of managers climbing the career ladder until they reach their "peak incompetence"
For me this is a perfect example of one of the drawbacks of the ministerial approach to governance.
Electing your representatives is great but then expecting those representatives to actually run the government leads to bad situations like this. Imagine if all of the C level positions in a company had to be filled from the board.
Germany is anything if not bureaucratic, and in this bureaucracy was the information encoded on how to run things.
Recently, attempts were made to privatize these bureaucratic behemoths, by having mc kinsey experts advise the military bureaucracy. Resulting in lots of key personal quitting and joining the consulting company. Now the state organs have dementia, unless he rehires the expensive external experts.
Which can lead to ministers looking ineffective if they do not rehire the privatized personal at any price. But then again, the bundeswehr minister post was usually one to send over-eager future political enemies to die. Van der Leyen was originally leading that resort.
They still have all the bureaucracies and all that alleged "institutional knowledge", the consultants just came on top to provide scapegoats when some decisions turns out to be wrong.
The bureaucracies are full of bureaucrats, and that's the problem. They don't want to make decisions (because they could be blamed), they've only ever learned how to maneuver in bureaucracies, so they're pretty much useless for anything but bureaucratic work. Turns out, even if you work in a bureaucracy, you still need to get some actual work done, e.g. on military policy. And they mostly can't. When they accidentally hire people that can, those people will smash their head against the wall of incompetence and political corruption until they leave, and who can blame them?
> After repeated admissions that she did not understand the army’s ranking system
what in the world? Are defense ministers usually this incompetent?
Here in Germany, yes. And it's not just the defense ministers, either. Whoever is going to replace her is unlikely to actually be better at the job, but if competence were an actual requirement, then I dare say at least 80% of our government would be out of a job.
Funny thing is, she actually did a better job than her predecessors. That should tell you all about how low that bar was to begin with.
Boris Pistorius is the new defense minister of Germany: https://amp.dw.com/en/boris-pistorius-to-become-germanys-new...
He used to be member of a german-russian group of friendship: http://web.archive.org/web/20211023174604/https://www.bundes...