NATO's Chiefs of Defence Elect General Carsten Breuer Chair of the Military Committee From Summer 2027
Copenhagen, 19 September 2026
Key points
- NATO said on 19 September, at the close of the Military Committee conference in Copenhagen: "Allied nations elected General Carsten Breuer, Chief of Defence of Germany, to be the next Chair of the NATO Military Committee. He will assume the post in summer 2027, for a three-year mandate"
- The 32 chiefs of defence voted by secret ballot; the other candidate was General Jennie Carignan, Canada's chief of the defence staff, and the tally was not disclosed
- Breuer succeeds Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone of Italy, in office since January 2025; he has been the Bundeswehr's inspector general since March 2023
- The last German chair was General Harald Kujat, from July 2002 to June 2005; Breuer would be the sixth German officer in the post
Germany's most senior soldier will chair the body that turns the alliance's political decisions into military advice, from the summer in which the results of the American posture review are being carried out.
Boris Pistorius called the election "excellent news for the Alliance" and said Breuer had "helped, at a decisive point, to reorganise the Bundeswehr" and was "very well connected" with "the will to shape things". Friedrich Merz wrote that Germany was "grateful for the trust our allies place in us". Carignan said it had been "an honour to stand as a candidate". Cavo Dragone, closing the conference, said the chiefs would now "shift focus from committing budgets to delivering on capabilities".
In Berlin the conversation turned to the vacancy within a day. Thomas Röwekamp, who chairs the Bundestag defence committee, said the Bundeswehr "cannot afford" a drawn-out contest at its top, and the armed forces association asked for a quick decision.
The chair commands nothing; its holder brokers consensus among 32 chiefs and speaks for them to the North Atlantic Council, and Breuer's election matters for what he will have to broker. From mid-2027 the committee's standing business is who assumes the roles American forces give up, and the chiefs have chosen the officer whose own army is the designated replacement for most of them. He arrives with a particular method. In June he and General Alexus Grynkewich, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, sat down at Schloss Elmau with some two dozen European and American companies over requirements for 2029, 2035 and 2039, a soldier's end-run around procurement bureaucracies that the Military Committee has not attempted at alliance level. The cost is Berlin's. Breuer leaves in the middle of the Bundeswehr's expansion, with the new military service law in its first intake years, and his successor inherits the 2029 readiness date without having set it. For Ottawa the defeat is sharper than it looks, since a Canadian chair was the cheapest available proof of the European turn Mark Carney has been describing. The name of the next inspector general is on the watch list of Signal No. 150. A planner or a force-generator: the choice will say which half of Breuer's job Pistorius thinks is unfinished.
