Radical Reorganization of Military Commands
The biggest reform in generations is being proposed.
WaPo (“Pentagon plan calls for major power shifts within U.S. military“):
Senior Pentagon officials are preparing a plan to downgrade several of the U.S. military’s major headquarters and shift the balance of power among its top generals, in a major consolidation sought by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, people familiar with the matter said.
If adopted, the plan would usher in some of the most significant changes at the military’s highest ranks in decades, in part following through on Hegseth’s promise to break the status quo and slash the number of four-star generals in the military. It would reduce in prominence the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command by placing them under the control of a new organization known as U.S. International Command, according to five people familiar with the matter.
[…]
The plan also calls for realigning U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Northern Command, which oversee military operations throughout the Western Hemisphere, under a new headquarters to be known as U.S. Americas Command, or Americom, people familiar with the matter said. That concept was reported earlier this year by NBC News.
Pentagon officials also discussed creating a U.S. Arctic Command that would report to Americom, but that idea appears to have been abandoned, people familiar with the matter said.
Combined, the moves would reduce the number of top military headquarters — known as combatant commands — from 11 to eight while cutting the number of four-star generals and admirals who report directly to Hegseth. Other remaining combatant commands would be U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Space Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Transportation Command.
There’s no way to evaluate the merits of this plan without more detail. There are certainly synergies to be had here, but how much efficiency and cost savings are gained will be almost entirely a function of staffing sizes. If we simply consolidate existing staff into fewer headquarters, the savings will be minimal.
The most obvious loss here is geographic relationship-building. Geographic Combatant Commanders serve as regional proconsuls, spending most of their time meeting with allies and partners. That’s hard enough to do with Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; trying to do so with all three regions will be next to impossible.
To the extent that this is about reducing the number of four-star generals, it would be far easier to do at the level of service component staff. But, even there, there are relational considerations. It’s arguably problematic to have, for example, four-star Army and Air Force commanders (USAEUR and USAFE) reporting to a four-star EUCOM commander. But if allied armies and air forces have four-star commanders, their American counterpart can’t be a three-star.
This plan—which is still pre-decisional—is far less radical than other options explored:
Senior military officials considered about two dozen other concepts, the senior defense official said. At least one discussion called for a reduction to six total combatant commands. Under that plan, Special Operations Command, Space Command and Cyber Command would be downgraded and placed under the control of a new U.S. Global Command, said other officials familiar with the discussion.
Caine is expected to share at least two other courses of action with Hegseth, people familiar with the matter said. One concept calls for creating two commands to house all of the others, with all major geographic organizationssuch as Central Command and European Command placed under the control of an entity that would be called Operational Command. Other major headquarters, such as Transportation Command and Space Command, would fall under an organization called Support Command.
One proposal suggested the creation of a new headquarters unit, Joint Task Force War, to be based at the Pentagon. It would focus on planning and strategy when the United States was not at war, and be capable of controlling forces anywhere in the world when there was a conflict, people familiar with the matter said.
There is a time-honored technique in military circles for staffs to propose three options, at least one of which is so radical as to be a “throwaway” course of action, to the boss. One has to be careful that the boss doesn’t seize upon that option.
A lot of this is just moving boxes around on an org chart. Activity vs action.
Another way of looking at organization would be, in corporate terms, product vs functional alignment. The Geographic commands would be analogous to product while Transportation and Space would be analogous to functions.
I would be interested in how this aligns with the much maligned National Security Strategy.
@Scott:
This particular reshuffling implicitly downgrades Europe/NATO to the kind of alliances that the US has with, let’s say, Egypt or Qatar.
It seems quite obvious that wanting to limit the number of 4-stars is just a rather transparent excuse.
This is the one they’ll pick. Closest to a German General Staff without having to change the law in Title 10.
Sigh… I keep thinking that it all makes some sort of weird sense if you assume the goal is Donald, First of His Name, Mad King of North America. Cull the military leadership. Bring troops closer to the US. Eg, now there’s a carrier strike group in the Caribbean instead of the Med, the NSS tees up pulling 85,000 troops out of Europe, etc. I don’t think they’re capable of looking far enough ahead to actually plan it, more likely that they’ll just stumble into it.
It’s not like everything that comes out of this so-called administration is a terrible idea, but… Oh, never mind.
Not all changes are reforms.
During a terrible recession when I got out of college, I was doing temp work at an ad firm which was pitching the branding for a room with a fax machine. The ad company wanted the client to pick something like Hotel Executive Lounge Place — I forget the details there, but it spelled out Help.
So, since the client needed choices, but they had to be worse. Option 2 was amazingly forgettable. Even more forgettable than Help — let’s just say Fax Room. Option 3 had to be the off the wall suggestion that showed they were really thinking, but which was safely outside of consideration. It was “Corporate Commune”
It’s an overstatement to say that I was responsible for this. I was, however, given the giant pad of brainstorming papers and tasked with making a two lists of the rejected ideas — 10 even more dull than Help, and 10 completely insane. And there weren’t 10 insane ideas, because these were kind of dull people, so I just added Corporate Commune to the list.
It was, however, the start of a long trend in my career that can best be summarized by the motto “no one should listen to Gus”
It was someone else that picked Corporate Commune from the list of terrible options. And it was the client that when presented with Help, Fax Room and Corporate Commune chose the only one that had any life to it — Corporate Commune.
There were two problems with this. The first was that this did not at all fit with the client’s general reputation and image. The second, and far more important problem, was that it was going to be a complete laughing stock and reflect poorly on the ad company.
And so, the rest of the summer was spent with the ad company trying to kill this idea before it saw the light of day.
The simplest answer was to get a focus group and let the focus group kill it, except the focus group liked it. The focus group was comprised of a representative selection of business professionals, with a nod towards diversity, and included exactly one attractive woman — and she said she thought it was good, and all the men were trying to impress her. She backtracked, and this just made the men want to prove to her that she was now wrong.
So, the obvious solution was to do the focus group again, but not include a woman who would mess things up, or at least make sure she was homely and quiet. And this time the result was so amazingly negative that they couldn’t let the client see it — they were laughing about how it was the stupidest thing they had ever heard.
They needed the focus group to just be moderate disapproval. They needed people to be saying things like “I like this, but…”
I suggested that they just create an entirely fake focus group, since they already knew what results they wanted. Obviously no one should listen to the temp, so they just ran the focus group again, and actually managed to get a group of people who were largely offended and wanted to just leave the focus group early, because they were really just there for the free lunch and they ate the lunch and this was going nowhere.
This was then the first time that I heard a statement that would define my career across any industry. “Gus has a terrible idea. If no one has a better idea we’re just going to have to go with it.”
And so, a variety of statements and phrases were written, unemployed actors were employed, and they got their focus group of people saying things like “I like it, but I don’t think accounting will. Can I expense a corporate commune?” “I don’t like being reminded that other people used the fax machine before me”, etc.
The client was disappointed but understanding and switched to their second choice (the really dull one). And all was well. Except the boy with the big brown eyes over in creative was disappointed that his Soviet Propaganda Style posters about fax machines would never see the light of day.
And by that time everyone was ready for the next fiasco, which involved darkening the skin tones of models before placing ads in magazines for black people. I was not involved in that fiasco.
I think it reflects an opinion that specialization is not necessary. The commands were set up with an assumption of nuance is important, the cultures must be understood and that understanding requires specialists, but to guys like Hegseth the rest of the world is simply “Them.” No need to cultivate allies.