via American Mercenary...
AM is talking about the US Army in this piece but it had me referencing the USMC and our current makeup. 80+ general officers for a force that is moving to 175,000 persons?
The issue isn't with Colonels and below. The issue is too many damn generals.
If you want to "reform" the USMC then the first thing that should be "taken down to the river and held under till it stops kicking" is the general officer corps.
For a supposedly lean organization we've becoming amazingly top heavy. Fixing the USMC means culling the number of generals by at least half. Its the only thing that makes sense.
NOTE: Unfortunately this isn't a USMC specific problem. Its DoD wide. Check out this post from ELP Blog. More flags than E-9's? Amazing.
The USMC has always had a leaner Officer to Enlisted ratio, but the USMC has always had a more defined mission set, relies on the US Navy for many services while at sea, and cannot by law operate on land for more than 6 months without being provided services by the US Army. So using the USMC as an example for the Army is not a good plan (the USMC isn't ever going to be responsible for a theater wide logistics distribution plan).Read the entire article here.
AM is talking about the US Army in this piece but it had me referencing the USMC and our current makeup. 80+ general officers for a force that is moving to 175,000 persons?
The issue isn't with Colonels and below. The issue is too many damn generals.
If you want to "reform" the USMC then the first thing that should be "taken down to the river and held under till it stops kicking" is the general officer corps.
For a supposedly lean organization we've becoming amazingly top heavy. Fixing the USMC means culling the number of generals by at least half. Its the only thing that makes sense.
NOTE: Unfortunately this isn't a USMC specific problem. Its DoD wide. Check out this post from ELP Blog. More flags than E-9's? Amazing.
By law the services are capped for GO population, with the USMC at 60 and the Army at 230. Generally the USMC is somewhere between a third and half of the Army end strength, but gets about a quarter of the GO slots.
ReplyDeleteThe rub is that there are more general slots than there are authorized general slots, and generals serving in a "joint or multinational" capacity don't count against the service cap.
So call it a difference of perspective, from where I sit in the Big Green Machine, the USMC is very lean.
But riddle me this, why is the Air Force authorized two more 4 Star positions than the Army?
i can see how you could see things that way, but i read that an ungodly number of Capt's and Maj's are about to get cut from the Army (if Army Times is right) and the Marines are about to shave quite a few people from its ranks too.
Deleteto me this is a leadership issue. how many generals do we need when we're raping our forces and cutting them to the bone. if we can do this to the force, then HQ's everywhere need to be eviscerated AT BEST. i think we could even eliminate a few of them.
General Officers are a plague upon the service. They need to be halved and their staffs axed.
ReplyDeleteWell, they are reliving a failed experiment from the 90's all over again. They are combining II MEF and MarForCom GO billets. 1 GO, two staffs. It was a dismal failure in the 90's, guess the lessons learned all retired.
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