Volker Wieker

Volker Wieker
General Volker Wieker
Born	(1954-03-01) 1 March 1954 (age 63) Delmenhorst, Germany
Allegiance	Germany
Years of service	1974– present
Rank	General
Commands held	Panzerartilleriebataillon 215 Panzergrenadierbrigade 40 3rd German KFOR Contingent/KFOR MNB South I. German/Dutch Corps
Battles/wars	IFOR, KFOR, ISAF

Volker Wieker (born 1 March 1954 in Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony) is the Chief of Staff (Generalinspekteur, lit. Inspector General) of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces. As the highest-ranking officer of the Bundeswehr he is the government's chief military adviser and the general ultimately in charge of its operations. Trained as an artillery officer, General Wieker served in every major foreign Bundeswehr deployment since 1996, including Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Wieker was born in Delmenhorst and joined the Bundeswehr in 1974 for officer training in the army's artillery branch.

He studied geodesy at the Bundeswehr University of Munich and served as an officer in an armored artillery battalion in Wildeshausen. He passed his General Staff training at the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr (Hamburg) in 1989, followed by the US Army's Command and General Staff Officer Course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Upon his return to Germany, he was assigned as the operations officer of an armored brigade in Augustdorf.

Following battalion command with an armored artillery battalion in 1993-96, Wieker was deployed as the operations and training officer for the German Army Contingent IFOR in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Upon his return, he was assigned to the Federal Ministry of Defence (Germany) in Bonn as Military Assistant of the Federal Minister of Defence (1997–1999). In 1999, he led a ministerial task force on the future force structure of the German Army, before taking command of an armored infantry brigade in Schwerin later that year.