How many generals do we need? Or: The case against generals

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This blog post will be close to maximum disrespectful towards general ranks. The two reasons for my disrespect are the reasoning I will lay out and military history.

Today's armies (and air forces) have great many officers at general rank on active duty. A ratio of personnel strength to quantity of generals close to 1,000:1 is not unusual nowadays (edit: German military as a whole in 2019: 935:1 for troops to generals+admirals, assuming no vacancies among generals and admirals). The U.S. armed forces had a ratio of about 8,000:1 between overall personnel and generals plus admirals by late WW2, for comparison.

 

So, how many generals do you need?

I'll begin with the field army. One might think a brigade is commanded by a brigade general, but in many armies it's commanded by a colonel. So for a high scenario you need one general per brigade (none per independent regiment), but none for a low scenario.

The commonly most-respected ratio of brigades to divisions is three brigades in a division. The division commander has a general rank, but his executive officer and second in command doesn't need to have one. Moreover, we could use four brigades per division, but I won't choose that for the high scenario. So the high scenario is at five general ranks per division, low one is at one.

Next, the corps level. A corps usually also follows the rule of three, a corps with only two division makes really only sense if the mobilised strength of an army is either two or five divisions. We can safely assume that the second in command of a corps is at general rank like the commander himself. Let's add one reserve general. So we're at 17 generals for an army corps in the high scenario and six for the low scenario.

The entire German field army as of now and into 2030 is not going to need more than 17 generals and could very well make do with six.

 

So why are there so many more generals? They're not needed for the field army. Instead, they're in management jobs, comparable to management board members in a public company.

And here's the thing; we could hire civilian managers for most of those jobs. (Junior) officers of the reserve often advance in business leadership positions, so there's enough of a reserves pool and they can be called up even at high age (not just 45 years of age as is the limit for ordinary conscripts in some countries).

Imagine a mobilised army strength of two army corps. The 2nd (reserve) corps would need 6...17 general rank officers, but it would be inactive in peacetime. These general rank officers could be in exactly the kind of management positions where a civilian manager (even if he/she/it is a captain in the reserves) would be insufficient: Leading the military schools, doctrine development, future force planning.

Many Western countries are in NATO, and the "O" stands for organisation, but by now it should be a "B" for "bureaucracy". Great many career officers have jobs in said bureaucracy and in NATO HQs of often questionable usefulness beyond logistics management purposes. You cannot have a lean army with few general ranks and still play the games at this bureaucracy, for you would have to send generals to fit general rank positions in this bureaucracy. My advice is to largely stop wasting money on the NATO bureaucracy. The degree of influence on the largely pointless work there is small even for a country such as Germany. Command structures above Corps are the only really interesting HQ structures anyway. A country such as Spain would suffer practically no real negative effects if it ceased to participate in the NATO bureaucracy and command structure, for example.

 

So in the end, a bloated, top-heavy army of today could be crashed from around 200 general ranks to less than 40 (at two corps mobilised strength) without loss of deterrence or defence strength. You just need a couple years for the conversion and you need to make sure they never meet in the same room.

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de 

P.S.: I could make a case that a European air force only needs two general ranks because so much operational decisionmaking happens at below general rank level. And don't get me started on admirals!

 

edit: The Bundeswehr had 211 generals (not just army generals) and admirals in 2019. I cannot find any more recent figure, it doesn't seem to have been disclosed any more. So we had about 100 generals in an army that could be described as having a corps-sized field army and hardly any ability to mobilise reserve combat formations.

And don't get me started about the quality of the generals. We promoted the wrong people and turned the right people into wrong people. The problems already begin at lieutenant level - many of those are simply not suitable to become officers. Some of them aren't even suitable to be volunteer soldiers.

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Drone cloud support to battlefield drones

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Here's one thing that drones can do that manned aviation did not do in either world war nor in the Vietnam War:

A huge quantity of cheap yet EM-hardened drones with about 30 km flying range can saturate any counter-drone defence and thus protect much fewer actual scout and attack drones in the air.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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Artillery fires types

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The literature (including field manuals) usually discerns three kinds of artillery fires for lethal munitions*:

Destructive fires, neutralising fires, suppressive fires

The required munitions are the greatest for destructive fires, somewhat less** for neutralising fires (though the fire mission for this has to last quite long) and smallest for suppressive fires.

The usual literature approach is to pretend the target is infantry that has dug in or has some other cover.

Suppressive fires shall scare enough to make them combat ineffective during the suppressive fires, while neutralising fires are meant to shell-shock them into combat ineffectiveness that lasts long enough to complete an assault on the position after the artillery fires ceased.

This thinking about infantry targets with cover fits WWI thinking, but it's not very realistic even in modern trench war IMO.

The use of artillery differs greatly between high force density and low force density battle. High force density battles (such as WW2 Eastern Front) put a premium on the shelling of marshalling areas in which troops prepare for an assault. To shell such areas was reported to have caused more harm than the artillery actions during the by comparison very brief assault. Furthermore, it was reported from WW2 experience that most failed infantry attacks failed before they got into small arms range; so most successful positional defences were entirely carried by artillery and mortars (air power played a negligible role).

 

So for low force density conflicts, I'd say

• destructive fires on point targets of justifying value 
• ad hoc firing missions on moving or briefly halting forces, trying to achieve whatever best effect can be achieved in the brief time available to hit them
• obscuration for force protection
• (IR) illumination to enhance friendly forces' vision at night and possibly to damage the enemy's night vision tech

 Whereas for high force density, I'd additionally say

• destructive fires of heavy munitions (100+ kg or FAE rather than 155 mm shells) on known enemy point positions
• destructive fires on area targets if the enemy is expected to largely lack cover and hardening
• neutralising fires on known but somewhat dispersed positions (such as a platoon spread out on 1+ km of trenches or scattered 3-men positions)
• suppressive fires on suspected enemy positions while friendly are in field or view or about to enter it

I suppose this is roughly similar to the actual opinions in the Western artillery communities.

You can see that low force density battle such as fighting Taleban in Afghanistan emphasises accuracy and small dispersion - essentially precision guided munitions.

A high density conventional warfare on the other hand has good use for very destructive munitions (up to very heavy bombs) and a large quantity of dumb lethal munitions such as 155 mm HE shells.

155 mm DPICM shells are vastly more lethal on paper, but not so when fired into forests with a high tree canopy. This happens to be the most typical kind of marshalling ground for massing forces for and before an assault, though. The second most-typical one is for all I know villages - and DPICM isn't known for great lethality through roofs, while 155 mm HE has quite a reputation for ruining homes.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Other artillery purposes include propaganda (leaflet) munition delivery, illumination, obscuration (smoke) and some shots to measure the weather (multiple rocket launcher batteries used to shoot one rocket, sense its wind drift by radar until the rocket's self-destruction in the air, then compensate the aim for the real salvo). Lethal (high explosive) munitions can also be used for demolition, mostly demolition of buildings including bridges and intentional cratering of routes.

**:Whether the used amount was enough will only be known once line of sight combat troops are in contact. 
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