If you have been a long time reader here, you will know that one of my pet peeves is that the Navy has more flag officers than it has ships. A few years ago I picked a fight with one of the Naval Institute’s “preferred customers” on this very subject.
Well, it took them a while, but it appears the United States Senate agrees with me:
Sometimes when things aren’t going well, there’s an urge to purge—and Congress seems to be reaching that point with the U.S. military, sputtering along in Afghanistan and Iraq after more than a decade of inconclusive fighting. Late last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a shiver through the Pentagon when it proposed a 25% cut in the number of generals and admirals fighting the nation’s wars.
That’s 222 of the Defense Department’s 886 generals and admirals. “This provision is necessary because the size of the general and flag officer corps has become increasingly out of balance with the size of the force it leads,” the committee said in its summary of the action it wants to take in the 2017 defense budget. “Over the past 30 years, the end-strength of the joint force has decreased 38%, but the ratio of four-star officers to the overall force has increased by 65%,” said the committee, chaired by Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., a son and grandson of Navy admirals.
Part of the problem is that every time a major problem is discovered, rather than forcing the system to work the way it was supposed to; witness Uncle Vern’s many screwed up reorganizations and the whole creation of CNIC; the services just created another command. Thus we have Cybercom being created, Stratcom brought into existence, Africom, 4th fleet, etc, etc, etc…
You have 1 stars doing the work of CAPT’s, CAPT’s doing the work commanders should be doing, and worst of all GS-15’s running divisions that should be run by military.
The whole thing is a mess-and I stand by my arguments from 2011. Michael Junge remains 100% wrong.