Eight years ago, I wrote a series of posts regarding the Navy’s imbalance in its flag officer community. The problem then, as it is now, is that the Navy has too many flag officers. It has more flag officers than it has ships. I pointed out then that the issue was a reflection of the fact that you had one stars doing the work of O-6’s, O-6’s doing the work of O-5’s and so and so forth. The intervening years have proven that my conclusions were correct. The posts were hotly contested at the time by one of the US Navy’s preferred customers. Many brave commenters came to my defense at the time -especially when I decided to double down on the fight and issue a second post directly refuting the data of said “preferred customer”.
I have not changed my mind on the subject, especially after spending eight years working with Israel’s Defense Forces and seeing how they do business. Their Chief of Staff is no higher than a three-star, and they have far less general officers per capita than we do. More recently, the successor to General Gantz ( who may be about to become the Prime Minister of Israel), General Eisenkott instituted a program to “flatten” the IDF’s chain of command and thus make their commanders more directly accountable to their superiors. The IDF took a 4500 person cut from its professional force( a cut of over 10%), logistics was centralized with their Army G4, their Navy was reorganized, and their air defense forces eliminated their wing staffs making their battalion commanders directly answerable to the Commander of the Israeli Air Defense Forces.
So imagine my satisfaction when I discovered in the writing of two naval officers that I was way ahead of the curve on this issue.
It is entirely possible that the enormous superstructure of the Navy is actually working against maintaining an effective Fleet. We seem to be mired in a time in which counterproductive institutional incentives and dynamics have developed naturally in the absence of an existential threat to focus our efforts, such as a great power competitor. One of these unhelpful dynamics has been the explosion in the numbers of flag officers.
You can deposit a royalty check in the bank account any time now.
The authors of the article echo a lot of my conclusions from 8 years ago. If you go back and look a the posts you will find I took particular umbrage with CNIC for its astounding staff growth. Now, eight years later, they still deserve to be pilloried in my humble opinion – the shore establishment should return to the TYCOMS. More importantly, the authors of this recent article are right on the money when they make this statement ( of which CNIC is an excellent example). :
Fourth, cut the number of SES positions. Certainly, one may ask what these SES personnel can provide that uniformed personnel cannot. Continuity? Stability? Unfortunately, it seems as if these terms have become euphemisms for the sort of bureaucratic paralysis and risk aversion, in the name of self-interest, which increasingly plagues the services but especially the SES. Consider replacing these persons with long-serving captains, post-major command, and allow them to remain in place for multiple tours (as opposed to indefinitely as is the case with SESs) if necessary.
No Navy region ever needed a parallel business operations staff or an executive director. That’s what you have N codes and a Chief of Staff for.
And as much as it would gore my own ox personally, I’m on board with their suggestions to retain Commanders and Captains for longer than 28 and 30 years. Rewrite DOPMA to allow some of these folks to be retoured into jobs with responsibility, instead of creating some flag officer staff to do it.
Read the article(s) – mine and theirs, in their entirety. The truth remains the truth:
When the Navy was a lot larger-a lot of these billets did not exist, and we were an organization that was 200,000 people bigger and 300 ships bigger. Yet we still got ships deployed. Why does it take so many flag officers to do so now?
It doesn’t-and you know it. More importantly they know it. They also know that unless they are issued a preferred customer card early-or start piling up sacrificial bodies like cord wood ( Yes Admiral Harvey that remark is directly targeted at you) they know they are finished at one star or two star. That’s not exactly a reformist proposition for people who have spent 30+ years on an ambitious track.
The Navy is out of balance and this problem begets other problems.
I’ll still be waiting for that royalty check.
One of those rare moments when I completely agree with your premise. I wouldn’t use the IDF as an example though since they don’t maintain a world spanning military but we don’t need flag PEOs or hundreds of idle useless SES types and we don’t need the explosion of staff to support their fetishes and impose more and more burdensome work on the rest of the fleet. NATO down to about a robust division and that’s all the flag officers we need for that. Ditto USFK, 8TH Army and the rest of the charade on Pen. Likewise with Japan and why the Marianas need an admiral is a complete mystery to me although I’ve heard it said that admirals only ever pay attention to other admirals and feel free to blow off anybody that doesn’t have a star. Oh, and the enormous surge in SPECOPS 4 stars has just gotta stop. They did just fine for a zillion years with one 1 star admiral. We don’t need or want anymore.