New Minister of Defense: The good party soldier Pistorius

The surprise succeeded the Chancellor.

The new defense minister is not called Heil, not Högl, not Klingbeil.

Even those who think they know better than the general public where things are headed did not have the name Pistorius on their list.

In Berlin, it is often overlooked that there are good party soldiers in the provinces who are happy to be called upon to do their duty when the need is great.

A woman was the only candidate for the quota supporters.

And so far, Pistorius was only known as an expert in internal security and as a competitor to Scholz in the race for party chairmanship, which both lost.

Even when he applied for party leadership, Pistorius showed that he had confidence in the Bundesliga.

He would certainly have liked to take over the Federal Ministry of the Interior instead of Nancy Faeser.

But his sex still stood in his way.

Now, however, the chancellor is accepting, at least temporarily, that he has more men at the table than women.

There is no time for a ring exchange like with the tanks.

In addition, after the state elections in Hesse, in which Faeser is the top candidate, there could be pressure to reshuffle the cabinet again.

Can Pistorius do the cold start?

Pistorius now has to prove that as Minister of Defense he has what the Bundeswehr has largely lost: the so-called cold start capability.

He doesn't get time to warm up.

On his second day in office, he will be faced with a question that his predecessors and the chancellor have so far evaded by pointing to allies, particularly the Americans: whether to supply Ukraine with Western-made main battle tanks .

This is not a decision about weapon technology, but about the right strategy.

Modern main battle tanks would greatly improve Ukraine's ability to go on the offensive, as they are the crucial but just missing element for combined arms combat, which includes the promised infantry fighting vehicles and the anti-aircraft tanks and self-propelled howitzers already delivered.

Small lights compared to Putin

The new defense minister must be clear overnight, so to speak, about what the arms deliveries are intended to enable Kyiv to do: to simply stand firm, to liberate the areas occupied since February 24, or to retake Donbass and Crimea?

How much military success can the Ukrainians have in order not to corner Putin into launching a “liberation strike” that would escalate the war?

This is the security policy that Pistorius will have to deal with in the future.

Compared to Putin, the clan criminals in Lower Saxony are very small lights.

The main task of the new defense minister, however, is to strengthen the fighting power and defensive readiness of the German army.

The Bundeswehr not only has to contend with the fact that it has been demoted to a spare parts store for deployments abroad for decades.

Now she also has to hand over weapons and other equipment to the Ukrainians.

After the occupation of Crimea, the Bundeswehr, which was gutted but never repaired afterwards, should have been much more consistently geared towards national and alliance defense and massively upgraded than has been the case in the last few years of the Merkel governments - in which the SPD and the current one Chancellors were involved, which is now often forgotten.

Lambrecht did not embody the turning point

It's only since Scholz took his own party by surprise with his "Zeitwende" speech that the party has realized, albeit sometimes grumbling, that defense is necessary, that weapons have to be built and delivered to war zones.

And that all this costs a lot of money.

But most of the decision-making and procurement processes continue to run as if Europe were still at peace.

No defense minister can win the fight against the forces of inertia alone.

But he must march at the head of the reformers and restore the soldiers' belief that the Scholz speech was not just talk.

Because the turning point is still evident in hardly any barracks.

Lambrecht, who had to take on a heavy mortgage but was also the wrong minister in the wrong place at the wrong time, never embodied him.

Her successor, who after all did military service, is believed to be better at it.

Pistorius is obviously not afraid of the ejection seat in the Bendler block.

A sixty-two-year-old can also take the risk of forced early retirement more easily than, for example, the 44-year-old Klingbeil, who would probably prefer to inherit Scholz one day in the distant future than Lambrecht now.

That too can be called security policy.

And such considerations can also lead a chancellor or even force him to surprise the republic.