Pentagon Waste

[FarAway Sooner]

Yeah.  All this gloom and doom about having to cut back on weapons systems when they can't get their own finance function in order is pathetic.

Whether you're producing guns or butter, you can't expect to do a good job unless you can correct glaring deficiencies in your own organizational management abilities.  And these are glaring.

To use a private sector analogy, they're effectively padding the ranks of top management while management continues to stink it up.  That's a bad sign in the performance of a for-profit company, and it doesn't bode well for the DoD.

[LongBlade]

^But we're all working on it!

And it's much appreciated, but the trend is set: we do indeed have more admirals than ships - even in my intergalactic empire.

[jejo68]

One of the problems is that we're much more effective with smaller footprints now than we were in WWII.  Back then, we'd need an entire division or more to accomplish what we can do with a brigade these days.  However, what hasn't gone down are

(a) the number of HQs we keep around (in part a legacy of our mobilization-centric military that ramps up for war and back down after) so we have C2 to absorb units as they mobilize and form for the warfighting effort

and

(b) the inflation we put on the ground in coalition environments so our guys are stuck calling some Estonian 2-star "sir" as the senior guy in the room.
Everywhere we're fighting in a coalition somewhere, there's a US guy with more shit on his shoulders than anyone else, which is why we have a 2-star division HQ in the Balkans, with all of 1 maneuver brigade working for him.  It's why we have a 4-star in Afghanistan to look eye-to-eye with the Afghan military leadership, despite only having 1 corps HQ (3-star) underneath him.  The more of these joint/interagency/coalition deployments you see, the more you'll see unnecessarily-higher ranked US leaders, so our guys don't get pushed around by some coalition weenie with a power trip and 12 guys in theater.


I'm not saying it's right - I'm just explaining the reasoning behind it.

Just do like we do in Denmark.
give the Guy a temporary promotion until he is back home  ;)