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.
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.
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?