The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals
Retaining only 20% would also work.
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals
Retaining only 20% would also work.
Only 20%? The UK needs more axing than that. The combined uk armed forces currently have 400 to 500 flag officers i.e. commodore, brigadier or air commodore. I expect less than 100 are doing anything more than taking up an office.
20% would be a start in the UK, but not just in the military – Bishops, civil servants, NHS managers…the list is almost endless!
problem is though, we don’t know which are the good war commanders. If there’s a biggish war it’s highly likely the incumbent peacetime appointed one will need replacing.
Based on what knowledge of the matter?
Met a lot of Admirals in my career. A smaller number of generals too, one of which was Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Northern Europe at the time.
So what? I’ve met a load of vicars, I know nothing about the organisation of the Church of England.
You met them in passing or as part of your career? I had a spell working for MoD Navy.
The total strength of the UK armed forces, across all three branches and including reservists, is 186,000 people. The USMC is about that size also.
The USMC has 62 General Officers. The UK has 472 GOFOs. There are 848 GOFO’s in the entire US military of 2 million active duty and reserves.
Even if you double that number (to cover specialized knowledge needed to run ground, air, and naval forces) you have three times the GOFO’s of a similar-sized military force over here.
That’s a strange methodology. You’re comparing a specialised force with a generalised force and applying an arbitrary adjustment (double) to compensate. If you feel the need to make a national comparison why not just look at the ratio of senior officer to force size in the whole of each armed forces? My bet is it would be closer.
Even then it’s not the whole story. It has been the case since at least the end of WWII that the British Armed forces make do with fewer but better/wider trained enlisted and NGO personel. Simply because they have to do more with less. It might be more difficult to do that with senior command positions, and that would result in a top heavy looking ratio.
I did offer that comparison. The UK has half the senior officers of a force 10 times its size.
You have 5 times as many GOFO’s per capita than we do.
If you need that many senior officers you’re looking more like the PLA or an Arab military (where incentive is punished and all command and control goes through the Colonel) than a modern western one (where incentive is encouraged and command and control is diffused through the organization even down to the squad level).
So you did, my apologies. I was quite distracted by the USMC angle.
It is clear the UK needs a thorough pruning of Ruperts and Rodneys.
Comparing the US and UK armed forces in that way is like comparing apples and bottle openers. I spent three years on exchange in the US and it’s just not a valid comparison.
As an aside (and I know you didn’t do this) anyone who trots out the ‘more admirals than ships’ line clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and need not have their views considered any further.
2 aircraft carriers, 14 frigates and destroyers, 4 subsurface bombers and 5 subsurface hunter killers. Subs are technically boats but we will count them. Though I’m not inclined to include patrol boats.
Then we have 9 Vice Admirals and 19 Rear Admirals. There are also apparently 75 (!) Commodores who are flag officers, but we don’t need to count them.
An invalid comparison?
What does your force do that requires 5 times as many GOFO’s per capita than ours?
If you want to say your forces are largely defensive compared to ours then . . . what are all those GOFO’s doing? If you think that its because the armed forces will be expanded greatly during a way so you need the Generals to head all the new brigades . . . no. Our own real-world experience is clear that you need a large, competent NCO and mid-level officer corps to pull that off. Colonels can be promoted to General and form the new units with a competent NCO corps to fill out with conscripts.
But you’re not getting the conscripts anyway because the Pakistanis, Syrians, Somalis, etc are not going to fight.
The same stuff. Vice Admirals and Rear Admirals aren’t about commanding ships or men at sea, they’re the heads of departments. And the UK has as many heads of departments as other navies because we have departments doing all the same sort of things that other navies do.
Thus, we have an admiral representing us at NATO, one representing us at the Joint Forces Command base in Virginia, one for liaising with the USA generally on joint operations, one for India, one for Australia, one for the Middle East. We have admirals for logistics – supplying food and weapons and spare parts to ships around the world. We have one for designing/building new ships. One for making/updating/distributing maps of all the seas and waterways around the world, one for all the computers and networks, one for the radio and satellite communications, one for all the aircraft flying off the carriers and helicopters off the others. There’s one for training personnel. One for building submarines. One for operating submarines. And so on.
They’re sufficiently different jobs that you need a separate department/organisation within the Navy to manage them, and they all need heads to run them. In a smaller Navy, they’re obviously running smaller departments, but it’s got nothing to do with the number of ships. I’m not sure, but I think there’s only a couple of Admirals involved in the traditional Admiral role of commanding ships at sea.
The warships at sea are only a small fraction of what the Navy does.
You make the common mistake of thinking the officer/enlisted issue is the UK having too many senior officers, whereas the reality is that the US has far too many enlisted. The US armed forces are excessively manned. The overheads of running a nation’s armed forces are what they are, largely regardless of the size of forces.
You have more ships than Admirals (not counting Commodores) only if you include all the auxiliaries. That brings the ship total up to 60. Only 21 are major combatants with 29 Admirals.
The USN has 300 major combatants with 205 Admirals of all ranks.
So, yeah, the UK has more Flags than ships to put them on.
Now, that isn’t necessarily bad – Admirals command major shore commands (operational, administrative, and training).
But you do have more Admirals than ships.
I used to reckon the most important rank was Corporal.
Perhaps all those flag ranks who don’t have actual commands could be replaced by AI.
The US military is one of those romanticised things to the USA, like the NHS is in the UK. And I have the deepest respect for the sort of men that face a gun, but the truth is, most people in the military sit in offices, stores. Stick your uniform on and get nice treatment on airlines and people saying “thank you for your service”. Like NHS staff get shop discounts here. Again, crash teams in A&E? Paramedics? I would not like those jobs. But most NHS staff are taking blood samples and pushing spreadsheets around.
It means that much like the NHS, there’s almost a bottomless pit of spending. Call it a military project, it gets approved. No-one argues. Even if it’s pretty far from shooting Johnny Foreigner.
While something like 8/10 people are ‘support’ and not ‘shooters’, its those 8 people that make the remaining two some of the most lethal people in the world. The stuff that doesn’t appear directly connected to ‘shooting’ is actually what makes the shooting so effective.
That must be why there are 63,000 useless oxygen thieves in the MOD compared to 186,000 services personnel.
In which case, the people that make arms at Lockheed-Martin should also get “thank you for your service”. You’re not going to win a war without bombs, missiles, aircraft. What about the people that sew the uniforms? Grow the cotton for the uniforms?
Lots of people do things that mean other people are fed, don’t have sewage in the street. Does anyone ever go out in the street and bang pans for the blokes that remove fatbergs?
My dad had 18 months of his life stolen from him courtesy of the peacetime draft.
He was sent down to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where he served by keeping Ernst Blofeld and a bunch of illegal immigrants from getting their hands on the missiles. Or something like that.
There’s an expression I got from US TV regarding officers. Cake Eaters. It seemed so appropriate.
Admirals & Generals exist because you need somewhere to promote majors
And majors exist…
Majors hardly ever promote though. Its known as the rank where careers end. Most majors do not advance and are forced out or retire at that rank.
The majority of commissioned officers will make O-4. Very few of them will make O-5.
Major Jack (no middle name) Reacher being a prime example.
It is a pyramid. .
When Trump started his stupid, reckless war on Iran I asked how many Officers and Gentlemen of the Pentagon would resign in protest. The answer seems to have been none.
However a bloke did resign from heading the counter-terrorism branch of the Intelligence Services. He was an ex-Sergeant. We now have the phenomenon of NCOs and Gentlemen.
It’s only a stupid, reckless war on Iran if the Iranians were not actually close to getting nuclear weapons. And I, for one, don’t know whether they were or were not.
The relevant US intelligence people seem to have universally concluded that they weren’t close and, indeed, weren’t even trying. But even if they had been it would still have been a reckless and stupid war since it’s been ineffective (so far) and has revealed just how weak the US armed forces are. For instance a Navy that costs gazillions of dollars and yet has to cower a thousand km offshore has not proved a good investment.
Which relevant US intelligence people? Are you saying that the CIA has opened its books? I haven’t seen that if so.
What we actually know – this is from the IAEA, not people quoted anonymously, and, who knows, quite possibly simply invented, by the Trump-hating media – is that Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched up to 60%.
You need 90% for viable bombs; enriching from 60% to 90% takes weeks, not months.
There is no civilian purpose for 60% – reactors use 3–5% enriched, modern medical grade is around 20%.
Some of the uranium goes missing, the Iranians won’t let you see it or even tell you where it’s gone, Iran itself says that it’s building a new (fourth) enrichment facility at Isfahan but won’t let anyone see that either, and there are trucks arriving day and night at one known facility.
That amount of hidden, easy-to-enrich material is enough for ten nuclear weapons.
You may be prepared to take the risk; I’m not sure I am.
So you think Iran is no further backward from developing a bomb ‘if they had been’ than it was?
Ask the Ayatollah, the bulk of the IRGC leadership, and whichever trembling sap is currently in charge of the Iranian nuke programme.
As I say – that depends.
Were they building a bomb or not? I don’t know, and neither do you, but I invite you to answer the question: what were they doing with over-enriched uranium, and where have they hidden it, and why?
There’s fuck all point having the US military if it’s going to sit on its arse and let a load of lunatics who keep shouting ‘Death to America!’ develop nuclear weapons.
But yes: no plan survives contact with the enemy. I assume Trump thought the Iranian people might rise up, and that betrays a level of bad advice. But who knew they wouldn’t, or couldn’t?
You’re always dealing in unknowns and often unknowables.
One of the predictable outcomes was the Strait of Hormuz being closed, but far from the US Navy ‘cowering a thousand km offshore’ it has effectively reopened the Strait.
Even The Washington Post has been forced to admit that, in the week to 27 September, Kpler had crude flows at nearly 12.5 million barrels a day, only about 1 million below the pre-war baseline.
That’s because every time an Iranian sticks his head up it gets blown off.
At the same time, well over 100 Iran-friendly ships have been told to fuck off, or damaged, or boarded.
I go back to my original point: yes, agreed, all of this is a terrible waste of time, money and lives IF there were no plans to build a bomb.
I suspect there were.
Tulsi Gabbard reported that near-universal opinion to Trump. There have been no leaks to suggest she was wrong.
Hardly surprising – it was the old WMD scare from Iraq, recycled. Yet even less plausible because the warnuts had been saying for twenty years that Iran would have nukes in just a few weeks. Twenty years of speaking bollocks and suddenly, so subtly that the Intelligence chaps couldn’t spot it, they suddenly were just weeks away? Golly you have to be gullible to fall for that one.
It’s not the ‘warnuts’ saying they have the 60% enriched uranium but they’ve hidden it – that’s the IAEA.
And it’s not ‘gullible’ people saying you can enrich 60% to 90% in weeks, that’s physics.
I would rather know where the uranium is and what they want it for than rely on one politician’s reported comments to Trump.
Saddam had used chemical weapons. Saddam had been making numerous threats.
The mistake was thinking it was possible to bring democracy to goat fuckers. You can’t. The only way to deal with them is punish them hard & expect to have to repeat every so often
The mistake was thinking you can bring democracy to a culture in a handful of years.
It took the English 700 years to go from the first Parliaments to universal suffrage. Major social change takes around 2-3 generations to sink in.
The West has the attention span of mayflies. If it can’t be done in a few months – a few years at most – they give up and say it’s impossible. They have no grit and determination, no staying power, no will. They are floppy soyboys and girlymen who burst into tears and run away if asked to do anything hard.
Can you imagine the Mullahs of Iran saying “If we cannot bring DEATH TO THE WESTâ„¢ in the next ten years, we will write it off as impossible and leave them be”?! No of course not. Because they are a warrior civilisation not gone soft, and they plan to win. They’ll fight for thirty years. They’ll fight for a hundred years. They’ll fight for a thousand years, until their culture reigns supreme over the world and the weak infidels have surrendered submitted to the Will of Allah!
Even the communists seem to have the willpower to keep fighting for what they believe in, seeking to transform civilisation in their own image a century after Marx. What is this astounding concept?! These men not made of goo? These men who will not run away?
How can they possibly expect to win with an attitude like that?!
It is a culture war, a war between cultures, and the strongest culture will win. British (and European) civilisation spread around the world. We took tribal societies in Africa and Asia and South America and North America and over hundreds of years we raised most of them up to democracy and prosperity. John Wayne didn’t say “You’ll never teach those buffalo-fucking Indians democracy, I’m giving up and going home.” He said “Get off your butt and join the Marines!”
😉
After 2016, why should anybody trust US intelligence people?
The US Navy currently has almost as many admirals as ships. That doesn’t include retired admirals, who could be called back.
Yes, they need many fewer serving admirals.
“almost as many admirals as ships” sounds relatively efficient. I think the Royal Navy is now something like 5 flag officers to every warship (depending on how you define ‘flag officer’ and ‘warship’).
This has been pointed out for at least 70 years:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Parkinsons-Law-C-Northcote-Parkinson/dp/0140023666/ref=sr_1_2?sr=8-2
Parkinson even used this exact example, predicting (writing in the 50’s) that before long we would have more admirals than ships. And so it came to pass.
You’d think somebody would have learned, wouldn’t you?
I’m afraid that some commentators have missed the point. You have a surplus of Admirals and Generals so that if one screws up, you have an instant replacement who learns the lessons, and if he/she/it doesn’t, there’s another in the wings. A bit unlike politicians, who never learn lessons from failure, even though there’s lots of them waiting for their go.
It’s not just that. It takes decades to make general (and SNCOs and WOs) but privates can be trained in less time, months for the infantry and weeks at a push. If you ever want to scale up quickly you need those senior ranks in place to train, command and lead the new formations.
That only works if the replacements on tap are intelligent and capable of learning those mistakes. There are two types of GOFO – the political general (those who navigate politics and bureaucracy) and the operational general. Both are needed but in peacetime the political generals proliferate and that is the main way you advance.
When the US entered WW2 most of the generals of the US Army were Colonels in the ‘permanent army’ who were temporarily appointed to General officer rank in the wartime army.
Ditto the Civil War. Custer was breveted to General, as one more prominent example.