I visited with cousins with young kids in Oslo. The woman took a year off (80% pay from the government) and then the man took six months off after that, when she went back to work. By the time I visited, their child was 2 1/2 (now she's going on 7, eek!), and they'd both obtained flexi-work arrangements; he worked two days a week from home (and mind you, he was like a financial director at his company - a fairly high up management position), she had a teaching job for four days a week and there was a creche at her school as well. It sounded fantastic.

professional experience? Am I remembering correctly that you've got a specialised job with the DoD? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

..that the US establishment has a vested interest in scuppering any attempts to unify European command structures. Logistics is expensive, command and control is expensive, and the ideal solution would be to combine those functions across nations (the European Rapid Reaction force was an attempt to do this, and Washington killed it through political pressure).
All that said, European defense policy is pretty much entirely built around treaty. No one country can defend itself on its own. Yes, we know that. Even the UK with the largest military in Europe can't. But who would we defend ourselves against? The Russians? No amount of spending is going to help us against them. How about China? Ditto (although, er, they'd have to reach us first). Or America. Frankly, if Europe and the US end up at war we have a whole other problem. So then you have to ask yourself what the point is? I'd argue firstly, it's interventionism. Individual countries can mount small operations on a humanitarian basis (think Britain in Sierra Leone, or France in Liberia). Larger operations need multiple countries, and this is, yes, where we fall down. Because of the expense of maintaining larger C&C capabilities by country, our collective capacity is way less than it ought to be. The obvious answer is to combine that capacity outside of NATO so we can conduct larger operations like we saw in Bosnia without the need for the US, but the US stands in the way of that because it'll weaken their influence. I'd argue that's a mistake - we hear complaints that we always need the US to help in European operations, and it's true. But until Washington stops standing in the way of greater integration at a European level, it'll stay that way. If the US wants out of this business, they have to give a little.

Re: Age. I think that's a difficult one. I know a number of women involved in government younger who I'm certain could hold their own in the bureaucracy (and oddly, no men that I can think of). I don't know much about Spain's military culture. I know the US seems to have a problem with military officers wanting to run roughshod over their civilian counterparts, but because that's the case here, why are we so certain it's also the case there? I'm firmly of the opinion that part of the problem we have in military operations is too much micromanagement from civilians anyway: you tell the military what you want them to do, they say what they need, you either answer "I'll get you that," or "we need to do something else," end of story. The civilians shouldn't be dictating strategy anyway, because it's never going to be their forte.