Volker Rühe (born 25 September 1942) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as German Defence minister from 1 April 1992, succeeding Gerhard Stoltenberg during the first government of a reunified Germany in the fourth cabinet of Chancellor Kohl, to the end of the fifth Kohl Cabinet on 27 October 1998. During his time at the Defence Ministry Rühe played a central role in placing NATO enlargement on the German political agenda. He unsuccessfully ran for the office of minister-president of the German state Schleswig-Holstein in the year 2000, eventually losing against incumbent Heide Simonis. Early political career From 1976 to 2005 Rühe was a member of the German Bundestag. After the Christian Democrats returned to power in 1982, he joined the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's leadership under its new chairman Alfred Dregger. Under the leadership of CDU chairman and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Rühe held the position of Secretary General of his party from 1989 until 1992, including during the period of German reunification. In this capacity, he succeeded Heiner Geissler and was put in charge of administrative matters and electoral tactics. At a party convention in late 1992, the CDU surprisingly replaced Rühe with Heinz Eggert, a representative from East Germany, as one of Kohl's four deputies. Federal Minister of Defence, 1992-1998 As Germany's longest-serving defense minister, Rühe oversaw the country's integration of the former East German army, expanded Germany's role within NATO and was an early proponent of NATO's expansion eastward. He also proposed more spending on defense and won public backing as well as cross-party support for a Bundeswehr role in international peacekeeping, thus overcoming a German aversion to the use of force—in any circumstances—prevalent after 1945. During his time in office, German military forces were engaged in numerous UN-linked operations outside the NATO region, including 1,700 soldiers in Somalia (logistic support); 122 in Cambodia (medical unit); two ships with combined crews totaling 420 people in the Adriatic Sea (air-navy patrol); 60 in Bosnia-Herzegovina (relief flights), and 40 in Iraq (UN monitoring staff). Rühe frequently expressed frustration with restrictions on German troops joining international peacekeeping missions and faced public criticism of the increasing deployment of German military forces abroad. In 1992, the SPD (unsuccessfully) filed a legal challenge in the Federal Constitutional Court, arguing that the deployment of German forces in the Adriatic violated their constitutional limits on their use. Later, Rühe had