6 ms·

German defence minister Christine Lambrecht quits after series of blunders

41 points by FinnKuhn 4y ago

sendfoods 4y ago
> 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.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  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
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    They are, they are just in the wrong party.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    > 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.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      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.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        > 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?
        capableweb 4y ago
        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.
        luckylion 4y ago
        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.
        bell-cot 4y ago
        > 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.
      - belorn 4y ago
        > 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.
        capableweb 4y ago
- sct202 4y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sph 4y ago
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.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > very common phenomenon of managers climbing the career ladder until they reach their "peak incompetence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- sveme 4y ago
  > 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.
  - sph 4y ago
    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.
- sgt101 4y ago
  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.
smithcoin 4y ago
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?
- odiroot 4y ago
  I believe the quotas were agreed with partner parties during the coalition negotiations. Maybe they're even set in stone in the coalition contract.
  - danbruc 4y ago
    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.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Doesn't German already have a grammatical neuter?
      - ido 4y ago
        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).
      - danbruc 4y ago
        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.
badcppdev 4y ago
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.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  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.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    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?
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
> After repeated admissions that she did not understand the army’s ranking system what in the world? Are defense ministers usually this incompetent?
- thg 4y ago
  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.
amai 4y ago
Boris Pistorius is the new defense minister of Germany: https://amp.dw.com/en/boris-pistorius-to-become-germanys-new-defense-minister-reports/a-64418604 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.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/personen/DE/laender/ni/pistorius-boris.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211023174604/https://www.bundes...

41 points by FinnKuhn 4y ago

> 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.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
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
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  They are, they are just in the wrong party.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  > 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.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    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.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      > 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?
      - capableweb 4y ago
        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.
        luckylion 4y ago
        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.
        bell-cot 4y ago
        > 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.
    - belorn 4y ago
      > 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.
      - capableweb 4y ago
sct202 4y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sph 4y ago

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.

fsflover 4y ago
> very common phenomenon of managers climbing the career ladder until they reach their "peak incompetence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
sveme 4y ago
> 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.
- sph 4y ago
  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.
sgt101 4y ago
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.

smithcoin 4y ago

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?

odiroot 4y ago
I believe the quotas were agreed with partner parties during the coalition negotiations. Maybe they're even set in stone in the coalition contract.
- danbruc 4y ago
  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.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Doesn't German already have a grammatical neuter?
    - ido 4y ago
      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).
    - danbruc 4y ago
      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.

badcppdev 4y ago

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.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
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.
- luckylion 4y ago
  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?

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

> After repeated admissions that she did not understand the army’s ranking system what in the world? Are defense ministers usually this incompetent?

thg 4y ago
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.

amai 4y ago

Boris Pistorius is the new defense minister of Germany: https://amp.dw.com/en/boris-pistorius-to-become-germanys-new-defense-minister-reports/a-64418604 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.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/personen/DE/laender/ni/pistorius-boris.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211023174604/https://www.bundes...