An Interesting Point on Moves to Reduce the Size of the General Officer Corps

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It costs a lot, and make you lose wars

One of the areas where SecDef Gates is looking to reduce costs is reducing the level of general officers (general and admirals).

An interesting sideline to this is that history shows that the more officers, particularly general officers, that you have, the worse that your military performs:

Militaries with proportionately large numbers of field [major through colonel] and general grade officers have historically proven to be losers, not winners, in war. At its current levels, the U.S. military is among the worst.

Of course, the voice of officialdom, The Washington Post, notes that an officer's billet only costs about a ¼ million dollars a year, noting that, "Terminating a single general's billet might save about $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, barely a rounding error in the Pentagon's base budget this year of $535 billion."

This is, rather unsurprisingly, about as completely untrue as one can be without actually making a verifiable lie.

When someone becomes a general, he doesn't spend his days playing golf waiting for a war, they get a command somewhere.

If there isn't a command somewhere, then one is created, or the supervision of a task is upgraded from a field officer to a general officer, and the office, staff and budget are increased accordingly.

Once the office has a general officer in charge, there is a bureaucratic imperative for it to become "essential" in some way or another, so it will find things to do, and doing those things, whether needed or not, will cost money.

I would agree to cuts, but I would also suggest repealing the provision of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980, aka "Up or Out", which make promotions a requirement for continued service.

It creates an incentive for rank inflation, what Robert Gates calls "brass creep" in assigning roles in the services.

As to why these additional costs have not been addressed in their article, my guess is that the Post editorial board thinks that something would be missing from Sally Quinn's cocktail parties if there were not a few generals in uniform there.