Not a Scalpel, a Meat Cleaver

September 27th, 2026

How many times have you heard the phrase: Personnel is Policy?

Think about that as we chew through some numbers.

But before we discuss the numbers, there are some assumptions we need to make.

The command structure in the US military is intended to provide a fighting force that can deter potential enemies and, when necessary, be able to defend US interests. How precisely we get to a force that can do that is not the subject of this essay, but let’s agree that there must be an integration of weapons, systems, training and, of course personnel to operate the systems and conduct combat operations or whatever other operations arise.

War is unforgiving, and executing it well is difficult. The average Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, or Guardian will be lucky if, after 25 years in uniform they have come close to mastering the subject. Most will not. That should be remembered…

To actually function, the services - all services since the walls of Troy (and before) have a command structure, some good, many not so.

That command structure must provide the necessary decision-making to lead to maximum combat effectiveness, as well as the more mundane issues of training, equipping, and planning. It also, at each level, has a good deal of redundancy. This redundancy accomplishes two key things: it provides a “venue” for personnel at every rank to gain additional experience, and it provides extra bodies in the event a hot war starts and people start getting killed. An aircraft carrier’s bridge might have a dozen or more people on it; it can be safely operated most of the time with two people, the rest are there, to put it simply, to train AND so that some can die and the ship still functions. 

In order to allow a commander the maximum amount of time to focus on execution of his orders, commands need to be streamlined, and within the constraint of necessary redundancy to account for casualties, command and staff organizations should be streamlined to simplify the commander’s grind.

Accordingly, large, cumbersome organizations that leave various elements far from the Commander’s purview are not simply costly and inefficient, they are dangerous. History, in and out of the military, has also shown that broad spans of control work well when there is little change and little activity. But as soon as things become the least bit complicated successful organizations collapse the span of control, allowing the leadership to focus. A Combatant commander, for example, with 15 or 20 (I have seen as many as 26) senior officers reporting directly to him, is well past task saturated. Some of those "direct reports” are not working for him, they are working for themselves.

Said differently, the hierarchy of a military organization should be more broad in the ranks, among those personnel - mostly enlisted, but some junior officers - who perform clearly defined tasks, and increasingly narrow as you rise toward the top.

World War II, which by every account consisted of series of very complicated operations, in the US required integrating the activities of tens of millions of folks in and out of uniform, and the synchronization and execution of sophisticated war plans across the entire globe, with a force that peaked in 1945 at 12.2 million in uniform, and consisted of more than 6,800 commissioned ships, 4,200 merchant ships, and more than 110,000 aircraft (all services combined).

To orchestrate all of this, the service had some 2,068 officers “flag officers” (admirals and generals, one star and higher) as well as a total of 14,988 captains and colonels.

In part, this recognized that decision-making was handicapped by the severe - relative to today - limitations on data movement. During the war there was nothing that could be called a “data link” and ship positions and other locating data - on both friend and foe - was passed by teletype messages - text, at “75 baud,” or 75 bits per second, which works out to about 10 characters per second, or a page of text in 5 minutes. The average US household is running well in excess of 100 MBPS, more than a million times faster, and in the processing, is far more accurate.

Note that because there was no data link, the location of an enemy ship was just a latitude and longitude, a series of numbers. The receiving command then needed someone to plot that position on a map manually. If they got it wrong…

This also meant that there was a need for senior officers forward to make decisions as the chain of command would not be able to establish and maintain a clear “picture” of the battlefield even if just a short distance away, because data transmissions were too slow.

And, following the war, and in the eight decades since, the US has spent literally hundreds off billions in developing and fielding and refining data systems and decision support systems to both improve decision making in accuracy and timeliness, and to reduce the number of senior officers needed to align tactical actions with strategic guidance coming from the 4-star theater commander.

Accordingly, we have “right-sized” the senior officer corps in the wake of this revolution in data manipulation. Hmmm… Maybe not.

In 1945 there were 12,290,000 personnel in uniform and 2,068 flag officers. This included 30 x 4 and 5 star officers by the end of the war. It also included 14,988 captains and colonels.

Today the active duty force is 1,285,000 strong, and there are 848 admirals and generals. To include 36 x 4 star officers, and 10,994 captains and colonels.

Some ratios: 

4 stars:

1945: 4 + 5 star officers / troops:  1 per 410,000

2026: 4 star officer / troops:   1 per 35,700

All Admirals and Generals:

1945: Flags / troops: 1 per 5,900

2026: Flags / troops: 1 per 1,500

Captains and Colonels:

1945: / Troops: 1 per 820

2026: / Troops: 1 per 117

I think it is safe to say we are way beyond necessary redundancy.

And remember, these numbers are stacked on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the last 80 years to develop hardware and software to allow commanders to gain much greater fidelity of the battlefield - faster, more accurate, more survivable. And yet we need ten times as many 4 stars per man, 4 times as many flag officers, and 7 times as many captains and colonels?

You may argue with one or two specific admirals and generals (and captains and colonels) who have been sent home early by SecWar Hegseth. But think of the years of inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic knife-fights that must have taken place… an organization as lean as the services were in 1945 has become this top-heavy 80 years later. It is also worth noting that the Army and Navy of WWII won that war… Whatever the policies of the last 8 decades were that resulted in this mess, they need to be thrown out. 

It might be said that if the Secretary has made a mistake, it is in the use of a scalpel to trim the high command; he needs to use a meat cleaver.