German General Carsten Breuer Elected to Lead NATO Military Committee
General Carsten Breuer, Germany's chief of defence, has been elected to chair NATO's military committee, succeeding Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone.
NATO's military chiefs have elected General Carsten Breuer, Germany's chief of defence, as the next chair of the alliance's military committee, the body's current head announced on Saturday.
The vote took place at a meeting of military chiefs from the 32-nation alliance in Copenhagen. Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the incumbent chair, congratulated Breuer in a post on X, saying the chiefs had placed their trust in him at a demanding moment for Euro-Atlantic security. Dragone added that Breuer's operational judgement, familiarity with the alliance and leadership of the German armed forces would serve NATO well.
Breuer is due to take up the post next summer, succeeding Dragone. The military committee is NATO's senior military authority, and its chair acts as the principal military adviser to the alliance's political chief, Secretary General Mark Rutte.
He assumes the role amid significant change in the alliance. US President Donald Trump has pressed European countries to take primary responsibility for the continent's defence after decades of American leadership. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Trump's threats not to honour US commitments to NATO have driven many European governments to increase defence spending in recent years.
Germany, Europe's largest economy, has been at the forefront of that spending surge, with Berlin aiming to double its military expenditure to more than €200 billion ($230 billion) by 2030.
Breuer, a 61-year-old army officer, earned the nickname "the chancellor's general" after then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz selected him to lead a crisis committee that helped manage Germany's response to the COVID pandemic in 2021 and 2022. He joined the Bundeswehr in an air defence unit in 1984 and later attended the US general staff college in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as well as German general staff training in Hamburg. In 2014, he served with NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul.
Germany's current army chief, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, is expected to succeed Breuer as chief of defence before the end of the year.