One General per 1,400 Troops. In WWII, It Was One per 6,000.

The Approval Chain Problem

Colonel John Boyd's OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — is taught at every professional military education institution. The theory: faster decision cycles defeat slower ones. The practice in most conventional headquarters: a targeting recommendation from a ground force travels through a battalion staff, to brigade, to division, to corps, to COCOM J3, through a legal review, to the COCOM commander, sometimes to a higher authority, and back down. By the time approval arrives, the situation has changed. The people who built this system are the people who live at the top of it.

Death by PowerPoint — The Staff Tax

Every layer of headquarters generates a briefing requirement. Before a combatant commander makes a significant decision, the J-staff (J1 through J8) must be briefed and must produce analysis. Each staff section has general officers or SES equivalents who review before products move up. A four-star who touches 30 decisions per week receives 30 briefing packages, each prepared by a staff of dozens. This is not a metaphor — it is the documented daily schedule of senior headquarters. The PowerPoint-to-decision ratio has been measured by internal DoD studies and found to be several thousand slides per substantive outcome.

David Hackworth and the Top-Heavy Critique

Colonel David Hackworth — the most decorated US soldier of the 20th century and a documented critic of the institutional Army — wrote extensively about Vietnam-era and post-Vietnam general officer bloat. His book 'About Face' (1989) documented the shift from field commanders who led troops in contact to headquarters-dwelling generals who managed briefings and managed careers. Hackworth's critique was dismissed during his active service and validated by every subsequent study of the problem. He was forced out of the Army for making his views public. His observations remain the sharpest published articulation of what top-heaviness does to operational effectiveness.

What Special Operations Does Differently

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) became famous after 9/11 for operating at what General Stanley McChrystal called 'the speed of trust.' McChrystal's team restructured the command to push decision authority down to the lowest possible level — operators in the field could act on intelligence within minutes rather than days. This required eliminating briefing cycles, flattening the approval chain, and accepting that senior leaders could not review every decision. The conventional force has studied this approach for 20 years and produced papers about it. It has not fundamentally changed its approval chain structure because changing it would require eliminating the staff layers that justify the general officer billets.

The 2003 Iraq WMD Case

One of the most consequential intelligence failures in US history passed through a hierarchy of generals, senior civilians, and cabinet officers before becoming public assessment. The failure was not in the junior analysts who raised doubts — it was in the layers of authority that filtered uncertainty upward and converted qualifications into confident conclusions. An institution with fewer layers and flatter authority structures is one where ground-truth information is harder to suppress. The general officer layer does not just slow decisions — it shapes which information reaches decision-makers.

Douglas MacArthur commanded the Pacific in WWII with a relatively lean headquarters by modern standards. Dwight Eisenhower commanded the entire European theater with a staff that would today seem modest for a divisional headquarters. Both were effective because they delegated authority, trusted subordinate commanders, and avoided the administrative overhead that modern headquarters generate. Eisenhower specifically resisted the tendency to centralize decisions that his subordinates were capable of making. This model is possible — it has been documented and studied. It requires accepting that generals cannot be briefed on everything, which requires accepting that generals cannot be held accountable for everything.

The Marine Corps has historically maintained a smaller general officer population relative to its size than the other services. It abolished the position of Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps in 2020 and has resisted some of the grade inflation that affected the Army and Air Force. Marine commandants have periodically used congressional testimony to argue against additional 4-star billets. The result is a service that, while not free of the structural problems described here, has moved more slowly toward the worst extremes. The comparison matters because the Marine Corps performs similar missions and faces the same threat environment as the other services.

The Project on Government Oversight has recommended reducing GO/FO end strength by 20–25% over five years, eliminating headquarters staffs that lack clear operational missions, and requiring DoD to justify each GO/FO billet against specific criteria before Congress authorizes it. The Project on Defense Alternatives has argued for consolidating combatant commands — specifically merging NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM, and reconsidering AFRICOM's independent command status. These are not radical proposals. They reflect what peer militaries operate with.

General officer end strength is set in 10 USC §526. Congress must approve any increase and can mandate decreases. The 2016 NDAA Section 941 required DoD to study the issue — it did, and found that all current positions were justified. A stronger legislative approach would require DoD to justify each position against specific criteria and sunset positions unless affirmatively re-justified. The Senate Armed Services Committee has the staff expertise to do this. It has not, because the committee members who would write the legislation represent districts where generals are based and where their political relationships with the military depend on maintaining those relationships.

One surgical approach: require that any position vacated by a retiring general officer be reviewed before being refilled, with a presumption that it can be performed by a colonel or O-6 equivalent. This does not require eliminating commands or restructuring doctrine — just enforcing a presumption of lower grade at the margin. CBO has estimated this would save $200–400M annually in direct costs within a decade, plus the downstream effects on staff requirements. The political obstacle is that every general officer in the building has a personal stake in the grade of the position they will eventually vacate.