The Army Must Go on a Staff Diet

Idle Minds are the Devil's Workshop

We have too many staff officers with too few war-related duties. Keeping them busy is eroding the Army's ability to wage war from the inside.

I imagine duties expand to keep the additional officers busy:

With its many missions, the U.S. Army is hard-pressed to meet the requirements of the National Defense Strategy at its current authorized end strength. A major part of the problem is that the Army is awash in staffs, many of which did not exist during World War II, or even in the 1990s. After 9/11, the Army Staff grew by 60 percent, while headquarters and staffs Army-wide ballooned. All of these headquarters consume resources withheld from the warfighting Army. Nor can it be shown that Army functions are being executed more effectively or efficiently because multiple large headquarters have been created to run them.

The headquarters certainly need enough people(and technology) to make sense of and process expanding information about the battlefield in a timely manner. Hopefully a modular design capability doesn't mean commanders just want even more modules.

And I understand that at some level the Army needs excess leadership in case the Army must expand rapidly for war. But we probably went too far in promoting spares. And we absolutely need to find something better to do with them than shove them into staffs that don't need them just so they can punch tickets on the march up the rank structure (back to the initial article):

Such deliberate rank-inflation and over-staffing contributes to a bureaucratic culture that demands constant reporting from junior commanders, so much so that one authoritative Army War College study found a “suffocating amount of mandatory requirements” they are “literally unable to complete…forcing them to resort to dishonesty evasion.” Almost certainly, this environment contributes to an exodus of young officers who are frustrated by crushing administrative burdens they cannot reconcile with their duty to train their soldiers for war.

The ballooning staffs are incapable of commanding their ever-expanding mickey mouse paperwork requirements let alone commanding their subordinate warfighting units in intensive combat.

And as I observed, large HQs are missile magnets. I don't think the solution to excess officers is to mass them to be killed by an enemy in war.

Hey, here's one way to more productively occupy some of our surplus officers, which I proposed in Army magazine.

My suspicion is that the War of Terror against terrorists and insurgents led Big Army to expand for political reasons—nothing bad must appear on the news!—even as the lower level echelons and special forces retained the ability to act quickly to actually wage the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist war at the level of war that mattered in such fights.

But high-intensity conventional war will not be so leisurely and forgiving of individual mistakes as that fight against atomized enemies was. The higher headquarters will need to wield brigades and divisions plus supporting assets against conventional enemies. Mistakes will have a bigger effect quickly if our forces are too slow to react and act.

I don't think recent results are any proof that the military is better for having so many senior officers. As long as we need a good (figurative) Roman decimation anyway, we’ll fire two birds with one stone.

But God help us, I fear that the solution will be to set up a large staff to investigate whether larger and proliferating headquarters more effectively or efficiently carrying out Army functions.

NOTE: I made the image using the Substack feature.