|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
The US Navy has under 300 ships and under 300 admirals. The ratio of one admiral to one ship seems absurd but of the hundreds of admirals in the Navy, few actually command ships.
There are four rear admirals commanding the Navy medical corps, including a rear admiral in command of the US Navy Dental Corps and another rear admiral who serves as the chief of the nursing corps along with four more rear admirals in the reserves. (Not counting the president’s doctor who is also a rear admiral.)
The JAG corps, made famous by a CBS TV show which gave people a very wrong impression of the actual JAG workday and armaments, has four rear admirals. This sort of thing adds up.
The Army had 267 various generals (as of 2023, these numbers fluctuate) to 10 divisions. That’s 26 generals to a division. That’s nearly double what it was during WWII. The Marines have 85.
The Air Force has 241 making for a ratio of around 1 general to 22 aircraft.
Even the relatively newly spun off Space Force has 24 general officers. The Space Force has less than 10,000 ‘Guardians’ across six bases making for a ratio of one general officer to 416 Space Force ‘Guardians’ and four general officers to a base.
These are some reasons why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has suggested cuts are badly needed. The US Navy is woefully behind on shipbuilding and maintenance, and the service has struggled with its varied missions, but the one thing it’s not short of is admirals. The same is true for the other branches of the military which struggle with performance, but not with top brass.
Hegseth has proposed cutting 20% of the 37 four-star officers and 10% of the over 800 flag and general officers. As he and others have pointed out, there are more than twice as many four-stars today as there were during WWII even as the force size shrank by over 80%.
It’s not a new idea.
While Democrats reflexively protested the move, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposed similar steps under Obama with limited results. Proposals to trim down the upper ranks surface from time to time and go nowhere. The people at the top got there by building political relationships with elected officials, higher ranks, lobbyists and industry figures.
Some might reasonably assume that this growth took place after 9/11, but the actual number of general officers only rose from a total of 871 to 874 from 2000 to 2005. But in the first year of Obama, there were 981 general officers. The number of four-stars hit a high under Obama that had not been seen since the 1970s. The officer corps as a whole decreased, but the administration overhead increased in the military. And across the government.
The truly meaningful number is not the total number of brass but the ratio of brass to the rest of the force. During WWII, there was an officer for every ten enlisted men. The ratio is now approaching 1 officer for every 5 servicemembers. General officers made up only 0.048% of the force ratio in 1965. Today it’s 0.0630%. And the number has been steadily growing.
Critics of Hegseth’s planned cuts claim that we need growing administrative overhead to function, but the military functions far worse with this level of overhead than it once did. Apart from the financial burden, the chain of command has become diluted, the power of ranks have diminished and so have individual responsibility and accountability for military failures.
From 9/11 to Benghazi to the retreat from Afghanistan, no one has paid the price for military setbacks, and efforts to understand what went wrong have run into a wall of brass who all followed orders and none of whom are willing to take responsibility for initiating anything.
“To cut this amount from the senior ranks of the military, I think will impact military readiness,” Brigadier General Cary Chun, who among his other duties served as a White House social aide, argued and warned that limiting the number of positions that young officers can achieve could impact their morale. But is that kind of careerism remotely sustainable for a fighting force?
Making the military more appealing to certain kinds of candidates requires more room at the top, but as the ratio shows, there’s more root at the top than there is in the middle. Newly enlisted soldiers live on food stamps while the ranks of generals and admirals keep on swelling.
Men die in the desert while earning less than they would working in an Amazon warehouse while the brass socialize in D.C. and try to figure out why they have a recruitment problem.
Administrative bloat is not just the military’s problem: it’s America’s problem.
The number of college administrators shot up 452% from the seventies to today. Top schools have 1 faculty member to 11 students and 1 administrator to 4 students. Healthcare administrative bloat has turned medical institutions into bureaucracies while driving away doctors. There are now an estimated 10 bureaucrats to every doctor and most of our health care spending goes to service that perpetually expanding health care bureaucracy.
Wokeness further bloated HR departments at major companies where everything the corporation did suddenly revolved around ‘equity’ and HR’s DEI initiatives.
But if there’s any place where we really can’t afford wokeness, it’s the military.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center took on military bloat and wokeness before it was popular with our exclusive investigations, Disloyal: How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen and Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country as part of our larger project to reform the military. We’ve heard from the future secretary of defense about his vision long before anyone expected him to rise to such a position.
Veterans voted for Trump by a massive margin because they knew that reforms were needed.
Secretary of Defense Hegseth is implementing the reforms that the military desperately needs, that veterans and active duty personnel want and that will secure our future national defense.
There were similar problems in the British Navy during the 1800s I guess it was, with many officers on the seniority list but no place to put them.It was actually a huge problem, although it sounds like a comedy.. They ended up sometimes with 90 year old admirals, who only got there when the officers above them on the seniority list died. One can imagine the problems of 90 year old admirals commanding fleets during war time.
I miss the days of Fleet Admirals Nimitz and Halsey.
Because according to you I have to be a liberal be, you’ll be shocked to learn that today, as I do every year, attended the commissioning of an ROTC student as a 2nd Lieutenant. I wore my American flag tie. At commencement on Sunday, I’ll be the professor who has an American flag patch on my gown.
I hope another student will have on their mortar board “Made it Through College Without Turning Into a Liberal.” That graduate and now successful construction entrepreneur that did that three years ago visited me last week. (Please don’t tell him I have to be a liberal because I dared to criticize a Trump policy.)
Here’s one for you: name the POTUS who said of the very General he chose for Secretary of Defense “he is the world’s most overrated general.” Hint: he’s the same POTUS who said of the very Fed Chair he chose that he’s “a major loser.”
🎶🎶I did this and I do that singing Polly Wally Doodle All Day.🎶🎶
You do realize that your small time self aggrandizing posts exist only to celebrate your vacuous nothingness and all of the the mindless stuff you busy yourself with. All designed to prove you aren’t a lib. Ritchie, you are a lib. Amazing that you devote so much time to this issue.
An American flag patch. An American flag tie. Wow! You do realize every lib fraud in government wears one. If you were actually a conservative you wouldn’t feel the need to wear a patch.
As for your students who managed to get away from you, how do you know they aren’t libs. Did you poll them?
Re: your imaginary construction entrepreneur…… why don’t you tell me what the name of his company is. I’d love to know what he actually thinks of you.
Are you that idiotic that you actually think your silly questions matter, or that they make you appear smart? No one cares.
Ritchie, you are the typical small college lib. You will always be a small college lib. Some day you will realize and accept it. As for Trump he just completed a very successful trip to the Middle East…..and you didn’t. Sucks to be you.
Does the Obamacare that Trump forgot to replace with something really great cover treatment for your Truthophobia?
Are you still in counseling because someone criticized your god Trump?We’re still waiting for you to share with us what you do? I’ll take “Not a Debate Coach” for a million, Alex.
I have to give it to you, your god ended the war in Ukraine in one day. Telling Putin “just stop!” worked great!
This might shock you, I know the students are conservatives because they frequently share with me that they appreciate my willingness to confront and expose the downside of so many liberal policies. Guess which side I took in the debate with another professor on whether Clinton should be impeached.
As for the name of the former student’s company, I’d rather you keep doing research on me! (“In your head, in your head,,,”) Let readers compare your career to mine. Not intrepid enough? We’re still waiting for your commentary on my Tea Party speech. When did you give one?
I do want to admit you were correct about the Pope raising an army to fight the Muslims. The Pope has ads on Indeed and postings on Craigslist seeking warriors. Thanks for that beauty. Brilliant!
Who is this ubiquitous “we’re still waiting for” (fill in the blank). I will tell you this. I am not a debate coach, thank God. I would have to spend time with sniffy pansy boys like you.
I guess you simply want the Muslims to keep killing us. Or maybe you would like to debate them. I am not surprised. At least Pope Urban II had the stones to raise an army and take back the Holy Land. Charles Martel and King Sobieski also prevented the Muslims from taking over Europe. But now squishes like you have invited them in through illegal immigration. The E.U. is practically gone. Minnesota is rapidly turning into a mini caliphate. In Texas the Muj is building a Sharia controlled city. Parts of the Detroit area are fully islamicized.
I don’t care which side you took during the Clinton impeachment era. Or the Tea Party era, your big moment in the sun. And I don’t have to do any more research on you. It’s pretty obvious who and what you are.
I don’t need to be in counseling re: people who criticize Trump. After ten+ years of progressives trying to undermine him thru lawfare, impeachment (they still are) and basic stupidity, I’m used to it. The real question is why do you think it’s important to criticize him. If you are a worthless RINO maybe you should stop. If you are a pansy boy liberal even worse. I know, lets go back to the Biden years because we were so productive. In any case you guys lost the election bigly and now it’s “bitter table for one”.
By the way, you contacted me, uninvited. I simply said I missed the Nimitz Halsey era. Obviously that upset you. so who’s in who’s head.
Have fun at your commencement ceremony today wearing your American flag patch. Very edgy. Will your new boyfriend be attending too? You do such grown up things Mr. Associate Professor.
A fifty percent reduction in general officers is appropriate.
Too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
Levine has never been a commissioned officer in the United States Navy, despite the costume and title of ‘admiral.’ The US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps has military roots and is considered a uniformed service of the US, but has nothing to do with the US Navy and their bloated flag officer ranks.
Come on, Daniel. You’re better than that.
True. Back in the day many major U.S. ports had a Marine Hospital. Their patients were primarily U.S. Merchant Marine seamen. Google “List of U.S. Marine Hospitals” for a concise history of them.
“The Navy Has As Many Admirals as Ships…And the Air Force has a general for every 22 planes.” The growth in Generals & Admirals started in the 1970s when the separate combat commands started to be established. This has continued until today. When a unique threat or defense issue developed, the solution would be to “let’s stand up a new command to deal with that.” Hegseth is right to look at trimming down the fat in the defense senior rank structure.
The fact they promote a mentally deranged demonically possessed SOB named Dick (head) Levine to admiral shows what a joke that is – strutting around like a peacock, strutting around like drag queens that’s all this is – What miserable people they are – want to make the world as miserable as they are – they only care about graft, grifting, corruption and destruction – that’s these libertards – they are worthless to society, they are worthless to themselves, they are worthless to their own families!
Thanks Muggs !!!!! Many parallels to the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Putting Eunuchs in high places, making men dress in women’s clothing …..
Admirals and generals are paygrades, not necessarily an indication of their ability to command fleets of ships or army infantry divisions or squadrons of bombers. The same can be said for the rank of captain.
Fine. That only means that the rank structure needs changing, Make it General grade 1 thru 10 denoting pay grade. Etc. Rank should denote combat acumen not pay grade.
Fleet Admirals and Five Star Generals at at the very top of the list when it come to command
I don’t know anything about the military but many years ago in my
twenties, I had occasion to chat with a reserve Colonel. He told
me that military units must be trained “to think as one”. I never forgot
his telling me that – even sometimes remembering when I’d watch
soldiers fighting in combat in war movies. I’d think to myself ‘yeah, I
guess it is important that they remain focused and thinking as one.’
If that is indeed the goal of any strong military – then how can one
top ranking officer be in charge of only a small group – and how can
that situation occur many multiple times and still result in a cohesive
force “thinking as one”? Even I a civilian can envision in that scenario
many obstacles to achieving a strong and united fighting force.
Just saying. I’m just wondering. Except for the one thing I am certain
of and that is how angry it makes me that our newly enlisted troops
subsist on food stamps while the top heavy brass gets bigger and
heavier.
The main reason we have “more admirals and generals today then in Ww2” is largely due to today’s ten standing Unified Combatant Commands (EUCOM, STRATCOM, PACOM, CENTCOM, etc.). Those didn’t exist during WW2. Arguably, they are relics of the Cold War and could be rethought (as Hegseth is doing).
The reason the regional commands look so top heavy is that in peacetime, they don’t have many forces under them day to day. In time of war, forces flow from the US overseas to fill out those commands, at which point (supposedly) the top heavy command structure now make sense.
Could/should this be rethought? Sure.
Also, while new troops have to subsist on food stamps…have you seen the perks that these generals/admirals receive? Their paychecks (largess actually) is only a fraction of the benefits they get. These benefits include free housing (very, very, very NICE housing), drivers, limos, free travel, side bennies related to “conferences,” free country club memberships, and…..in one case….I knew a Lt. General who had his own train. Their lives are generously padded. General Patton wouldn’t hesitate to sleep in a muddy foxhole if necessary. But then, he was a real general….not a prancing cowboy dripping false medals.
The bloat is but half the problem. Individuals deemed worthy of club membership are put on a track to achieve admiral or general rank. The track is so protected that these persons are never tasked with difficult commands where failure could lead to stumbles on the track. Someone else, expendable, gets those jobs.
The result?
The upper ranks staffed with incapable people never proven to handle adversity.
Universities and colleges have the same problem with bloat, but also the same issue of highly placed but incapable people. Oh, they have all attended a school on leadership. So there’s that.
Rank should denote combat acumen not pay grade.
Too many chiefs and not enough indians result in only one brave circling the wagon train.