Yes, the US has too many generals and admirals, but Hegseth is not the man to fix that.
Our inept Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has stated that he wants to cut 20% of the four-star officer positions and 10% of the rest of the general and flag officer community. I am part of the group that believes we have too many flag officers and have written about this issue since 2010.
Hegesth is ignoring the reasons for this increase, however, and he is doing nothing to fix the root causes of it. Hegseth, being Hegseth, unfit and unable to learn, will never understand — much less address — the structural issues that need to be changed to make the changes effectively. As we have already seen, Hegseth is not examining the data; instead, he is focusing on gender and race in the flag officer firings he has conducted to date. ( Tom Nichols did a great article in The Atlantic on the terrible message to women in the military that Hegseth is sending by doing this.)
Without a major, and I do mean MAJOR, effort to reform or repeal the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, just cutting the number of active duty flag officers will not solve a thing. The growth in joint and interagency positions has, in turn, demanded a larger number of senior leaders to manage them. Any meaningful reductions in the general and admiral ranks must begin with a look at the staff swamp that created them. Goldwater-Nichols laid the foundations of this problem by placing too much emphasis on “jointness,” making it a prerequisite for promotion over skill and reputation in the key parts of the military profession.
After 9–11, the “let’s create another staff” solution to just about any problem went out of control. My service, the Navy, was a good example. Before the 1990s, we had a well-established Atlantic and Pacific infrastructure, with the shore stations under their respective TYCOMs for many years. Then, in the late 90s, as we started down the “better business Navy” route, the shore stations were transferred to the Navy Regions. ( These regional commands were themselves probably unnecessary, being a throwback to the way the Navy existed before World War II.) The regional staff expanded significantly, acquiring civilian civil service positions and establishing “business” offices that eroded the traditional staff structure.
The same thing happened in the other services as well. The creation of a new, separate service, the Space Force, was not only unnecessary but also created a host of problems for its parent service, the Air Force. All the services created their own space commands prior to the creation of the Space Force, and those remnants are still largely in place.
There was also the issue that happened on many long-established joint staffs. One service would send a field-grade officer to fill a “joint” billet, and another (yes, we are looking at you, USAF) would send a one-star general officer. To keep up, the other services did the same — there are plenty of examples of this happening over the years.
Many people look at the ratio of general officers to enlisted, and that is a good metric as far as it goes — but it misses a key point — it’s about the reduction of authority for the lower officer ranks compared to what they had in previous times. If SECDEF wanted to make a real difference, beyond reducing general officer numbers, he should consider restoring authorities to their former levels. The military, across the board, has too many generals doing the work of a Colonel or Captain (in the Navy), too many Captains and Colonels doing the work of a lieutenant colonel or Commander (in the Navy), and so on. If you want to make some effective changes, consider rebalancing these authorities as part of a flag officer reduction.
There is another issue that accompanies the increase in the number of generals and admirals, one I call “attendant baggage”. Flag officers require staff for care and feeding, and they have to “vet”, “socialize”, properly staff, and respond to other properly staffed taskers. It’s a self-defeating death spiral.
Plus, it gets even more ridiculous when you look at some of the titles these erstwhile leaders of men and women hold: five of them, for example, are “Special Assistants” to some other flag. Another whole host of them are deputy chiefs of staff for something-or worse yet, Deputy Commanders to two stars. There are reserve flags who are ostensibly Deputy Commanders for numbered fleets-yet ( and in this area I have personal experience) they bring little value added, and in wartime there is no way in hell they would be put in charge of anything active. Most of the time, their civilian jobs have no bearing on their Navy responsibilities.
There are probably seven or so who are commanders of schoolhouses-positions that, in the time of a much larger fleet, were held by up-and-coming O-6s. (Colonels and Captains).
It permeates all the services. A May 2013 GAO analysis found that the number of support staff at DoD’s Combatant Command headquarters grew “by about 50 percent from fiscal years 2001 through 2012.” This created added distance between commanders and warfighters. “In some cases, the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers,” former SECDEF Gates once stated, resulting in a “bureaucracy which has the fine motor skills of a dinosaur.”
Any effort to reduce the number of DoD generals and admirals must address the structure of the service as a whole. Each service has fixes that it needs to make — the Navy, for example, could eliminate its current “lead-follow” TYCOM arrangement, something that never made any sense. It could do away with its installation command and return the shore stations to the Type Commanders ( TYCOM) — as it previously was when the Navy had far more ships than it has now.
A broken clock is right twice a day, and that is what Hegseth is. Reducing staff and general officers requires a studied approach, not the haphazard cuts made by DOGE and others. Yes, cuts can be made, just not where Hegesth and other Trump lackeys think they can be made.
So, yes, reduce the general and officer corps — but only in a reasoned fashion that cuts SESs and reforms officer personnel management as a whole.
Otherwise, it’s just performance art — and there is already far too much of that in Hegseth’s DoD.