German defence minister Christine Lambrecht quits after series of blunders
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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...
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).
[1] apart from politics where the situation is oddly enough reversed
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is probably one of the most high profile cases showing that gender quotas are not a magic bullet.
Forget about "Credentials", "experience", "qualified", etc. A 90th-percentile high school kid could do better than she did.
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.
How many of them are the head of the military and have a giant amount of staff available to help them in that role?
(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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
what in the world? Are defense ministers usually this incompetent?
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.
He used to be member of a german-russian group of friendship: http://web.archive.org/web/20211023174604/https://www.bundes...