Commander, ISAF Regional Command – North

Born in 1958 in Landshut, in the Alpine foothills of Germany’s southern state of Bavaria, Maj. Gen. Erich Pfeffer began his military service in July, 1977 as part of Mountain Infantry Battalion 221 (today known as Mountain Infantry Battalion 233) in Mittenwald.

Between 1978 and 1982, he completed his degree in computer science at Bundeswehr University in Munich, the capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third largest city.

He served as platoon leader with 2nd Company/Mountain Infantry Battalion 232, in Bischofswiesen, a countryside town at the southeastern tip of Germany with mountains rising to more than 2,500 meters. From 1984 to 1985, he returned to Mittenwald to complete Army mountaineering guide training at the Mountain and Winter Warfare School. After completing this special training, he was assigned back to Bischofswiesen from 1985 to 1986 as the leader of Alpine Platoon with Mountain Infantry Battalion 232.

In 1986 he was promoted to company commander of 4th Company/Mountain Infantry Battalion 231, in the Bavarian town Bad Reichenhall. He served in this capacity for the next four years. From 1990 to 1992, he traveled to northern Germany to participate in the 33rd Command and General Staff Officer Training Course at the Bundeswehr Command and General Staff College in Hamburg.

For the next two years, he returned to Bavaria in southern Germany, this time to the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he served as G2 branch chief of the 1st Mountain Division. Garmisch-Partenkirchen lies on the border with Austria and is home of Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze, at 2,961 meters.

In 1994, he went to the United States for one year to attend the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Course in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The American college is a graduate school for the U.S. Army and international officers.

Pfeffer returned to Germany in 1995, serving the next two years as the assistant to the parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of Defense in the western city of Bonn.

After two years, he returned in 1997 to Mittenwald in the south, the place of his first military assignment, this time as the commander of Mountain Infantry Battalion 233 and commander of Battle Group, SFOR 1999.

In 2000, he accepted a position as instructor at the Command and General Staff Course in Hamburg. From 2001 to 2002, he remained in Hamburg as the Head of the Joint and Combined Operations Working Group at the Bundeswehr Command and General Staff College.

His next assignment took him to Brussels, Belgium, for the next three years, where he was a military assistant to the chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

He returned to Germany in 2005 as the chief of the Transformation Branch at the Federal Ministry of Defense in Bonn. For the next three years, from 2006 to 2009, he served in the capacities of commander, Mountain Infantry Brigade 23 in Bad Reichenhall, as commander Multi-National Task Force South and Commander of the German KFOR contingent, 2007. His next assignment took him again to Bonn as the assistant chief of staff planning, Joint Staff, Ministry of Defense, where he remained until August of 2011.

In August 2011, he was promoted to commander, 13th Mechanized Infantry Division, in Leipzig, a city in the federal state of Saxony.

In his current assignment, Maj. Gen. Pfeffer commands Regional Command North, headquartered at Camp Marmal, just southeast of Mazar-e Sharif in Balkh province, northern Afghanistan. RC-N includes all multinational forces deployed in the following nine provinces:  Badakshan, Baghlan, Balkh, Faryab, Jawzjan, Kunduz, Sari Pul, Samangan and Takhar.