Stars are Falling

Thinking now about adjusting my preoccupations. Maybe go from itinerant keyboard rattling to astronomy. Just staring at the stars and watching for any action. Seems like a growth field these days. And it will certainly be entertaining for folks like me who follow turbulence in the Pentagon.

What calls all this to mind has nothing to do with NASA or the U.S. Space Force. The former is still engaged in a urination competition with Elon Musk and his vaunted SpaceX outfit which is steadily proving what we all knew in the first place. Private industry is the way to go if you want to avoid snarling red-tape traps and budget overruns that balloon like Thanksgiving Day parade floats. The latter is still busily searching for a valid mission and a uniform that doesn’t put everyone in mind of the latest Star Trek movie.

None of that is on my mind right now. What’s got me longing for a new pastime and a high-power telescope is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recently announced “Less Generals, More GIs” program. That long-overdue effort will take a chainsaw to our bloated general officer ranks in all services. The proposal calls for a 20-percent cut in all four-star generals and admirals, plus a 10-percent across-the-board elimination of one, two, and three-star flag officers. If it works out as prescribed, stars will be falling all over our American military spectrum. And when the effluent strikes the propulsion system, interested parties like me will need a telescope and lots of bandwidth to keep track of it all.

No doubt there are extra truckloads of fainting couches being delivered to the Pentagon and many major military commands right now in readiness for what’s bound to become known as Star Wars For Real throughout the military establishment. I can already hear the aides, adjutants, and advocates predicting doom, chaos, and disorder if our military is forced to function minus a big bunch of flag officers but that’s fear and loathing among the desperate careerists. The real pros, the folks who recognize there’s often a broad chasm between rank and utility, are smiling along with me and waiting for the stars to start falling.

What we’re saying, what even Rudy in the rear ranks has been saying for decades, is it’s about time. Slice it with any logical implement and most would agree that we’ve just got too damn many general officers and admirals, often in meaningless, notional billets and overseeing nebulous programs. Too few of them are actually commanding troops or maneuver units. And a lot of them are doing things that could be easily and competently done by your average bird colonel.

The figures are astounding once you break out a fire axe and start hacking away at the bloat. It’s hard to stay current given the shifting sands and intentional obfuscation in our military billet catalogue, but just two years ago the Pentagon listed 37 four-star generals/admirals, plus 900 officers wearing one or more stars in all the services. Think about that while I choke down a handful of Motrin. It computes to something like one general or flag-rank officer for every 1,400 troops in uniform. That’s the size of an outfit that would normally be commanded by a lieutenant colonel or a full bird at best.

Is it necessary brass or is it bloat? You can call the shot but remember that somehow we managed to fight and win World War II with a ratio of one general officer to 6,000 troops. Mostly we’re inventing billets just so a senior officer who is eligible for promotion has a job and a chance to pin on a star even if they will likely never command any kind of outfit that merits a flag-rank leader.

Our chain of command has become snarled, top heavy, and obese with jobs that are not much more than sinecures designed to reward long service and pad retirement prospects. We simply can’t afford that kind of nonsense when all the services are scrambling and screaming for the nickels and dimes Congress doles our for what’s needed in manpower and hardware on the pointy end of the American military bayonet.

Don’t get me wrong here. We have some flag-rank officers today who are proven inspirational leaders, tactically proficient, and profound military thinkers. There’s likely a number of them among the thousand or so men and women wearing stars right now. And then there are the others who hang around just to see how many stars and perks they can acquire while occupying patently meaningless positions.

Over my years on active duty, I served with several solid general officers and admirals who wanted nothing more than to continue commanding troops before they were shuffled into some admin billet or forced to retire. They were always looking for a way to return to leading actual troops. What they wanted more than the gloss and glitter associated with flag rank was to lead—to influence our nation’s ability to win if war came.

Hopefully, we’ll be smart enough to cull the herd and find those thoroughbreds during the current fat-trimming exercise. Likely that will mean serious cutting, consolidating, and reorganizing to squeeze out useless billets. That’s fine and even healthy. We need to scour the ranks for the bird colonels and telephone colonels who are in it for all the right reasons and not star-struck, waiting around for promotion into a useless military stratosphere.

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