June 4, 2025: A new American government took power this year. The first order of business was to make good on their campaign pledge to root out inefficiency, corruption and waste. The small organization created to do this was called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Identifying the problems was easy, that had been done many times before. The problem was enacting the reforms. Organizations and their employees targeted for reassignment or dismissal resisted. While public opinion favored the reforms, those losing their job went to court. The court proceedings slowed things down but largely failed to stop DOGE.

Over the last eighty years the U.S. government has grown enormously. As it grew it became less efficient. This was another example of work expanding to fill the time allocated for it. For example, during World War II the U.S. had seven four-star generals commanding twelve million soldiers to victory. Now there are 44 four-star generals commanding less than tenth of the manpower used in World War II. Since the 1990s, with the Cold War over and military forces reduced throughout the West. The number of generals and admirals remained relatively stable. In 1989 there were eleven four-star generals. By 2025 there were 26 commanding fewer troops.

It's always been a problem deciding if there are too many generals and admirals in the American military, or are there? In 2010 the leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense sought to do something remarkable; reduce the number of flag officers, as generals and admirals were referred to collectively.

This reduction was part of a plan to deal with sharp budget cuts. American troops were pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan and much less was being spent on those conflicts. This seemed to present an opportune time to reduce the number of flag officers by about five percent. Some cuts were made but then those lost flag officer jobs slowly reappeared.

On closer examination it was discovered that there weren’t just more flag officers but more officers in general. And some of the reasons for that were very practical. Higher rank had become a recruiting and retention tool. The number of these senior officers was not the main problem, but how they were used. For example, during World War II, a lot more technology was adopted by the military, and that required some hard-to-get and expensive talent to supervise development, operation and maintenance. The military can't use many cash incentives, but it can offer rank and all the flattery and respect that goes with it. This works in commercial firms and politics, and it worked in the military.

But another cause for the growing number of senior officers is bureaucratic rot. This is a phenomenon in all large organizations, be they commercial or government. The United States did not have a large peacetime military until the late 1940s. This was in response to the threat posed by the Cold War with the Russian Soviet Union and its allies. While usually lean and efficient when created, organizations tend to grow bloated and less efficient as they increase in size and age. Additional layers of command make it more difficult to get anything done, even for strong willed people at the top of the command pyramid. The Department of Defense was not immune to the disease, and efforts to impose a cure have not succeeded.

Another problem was an unintended side-effect of the 1980’s Goldwater-Nichols Act which dramatically reformed the Joint Chiefs of Staff system and other Defense Department organizational matters. One of its chief aims was to eliminate expensive and harmful inter-service rivalry. There are increasing complaints that the flag rank career-making and promotion system it created have resulted in few, if any, officers being promoted to flag rank if their leadership emphasis is warfighting as opposed to bureaucratic politics.

All this was ignored until 2025 when a new U.S. government got behind the DOGE effort that was applied to the military as well as other government agencies. All these organizations had become over-staffed and less efficient the larger they became. There were more procedures and more people involved in making decisions. For example, during the war in Afghanistan there was a period when airstrikes required the approval of a Department of Defense lawyer before the attack could be made. This didn’t last long but it served as an example of how bad things could get.

While lawyer approval for airstrikes was eliminated, most other procedures remained and some became more complex. This required larger staffs and took more time to get anything done. There were few complaints. There was more work to do and more jobs for ambitious officers on their way to becoming generals. But with more people doing more work it was more difficult and time consuming to get things done. If war broke out this administrative bloat would fade as demands for winning battles overwhelmed any desire to have a large staff. The lean and mean survived while the bloated and sluggish were less successful.

While the United States is not currently at war, the DOGE program intends to make the military more capable of fighting and winning. This was done by trimming unneeded staffs and bloated organizations too sluggish to get the job done. Another target for DOGE was procurement and replacing more expensive equipment created just for the military with cheaper alternatives. There are often more efficient civilian software systems that can do military work faster. Moreover, the civilian software is more frequently updated, and problems are fixed in hours or days rather than weeks or months.

Defense firms that produce custom software for the military warn that civilian software is not secure or specialized enough for the military. Often the defense firms accept the reality of the situation and adopt the commercial software and add modifications required for military use. They then maintain the militarized software, especially if it now contains classified features.

The hardest task for DOGE is dealing with personnel issues. Especially the excessive number of flag officers. The historical pattern of growth in senior leadership is obvious. At the end of World War II, there were 5,400 troops for each admiral or general. By the end of the Cold War in 1991, there were 3,400 troops for every admiral or general. Despite the reduced size of the American military in the 1990s, by the 21st Century there were about 3,000 troops for each of these senior officers. This made it more difficult to get things done because more senior officers meant more layers of bureaucracy you had to go through to get a decision made.

In World War II there were fewer than ten layers of bureaucracy between most soldiers or sailors and the top military commanders. Now there are over twenty layers and the number is increasing. Much effort has been put into making decisions more quickly using better communications and powerful software. There have been some successful efforts to mitigate the damage inflicted by all those layers. One of these was the establishment of regional combatant commands where one senior general or admiral was the senior leader for all the forces in his theater and had a lot of autonomy on how to use them.

It's not just problems with too many generals and admirals. The ratio of all troops to all officers has gone from about ten to one in 1945, to six to one today. This ratio varies from service to service. In the Marines the ratio is 8.8:1, the Navy is close behind at 7:1, trailed by the army's 6.1:1, and the Air Force, with an extraordinarily low ratio of only 4.4:1, just half that of the marines. The low Air Force ratio is due to the large number of pilots and the high proportion of very technical jobs.

The enormous growth in technical jobs, and the difficulty in recruiting and keeping the needed technical personnel has led to more officer jobs, and cash bonuses for both officers and enlisted personnel in hard to fill slots. Supply and demand keep these officer jobs, or cash bonuses, in play. Many of the additional admirals and generals oversee very technical operations that require a lot of skill and experience to carry out. Sometimes the military cannot find qualified people to fill these jobs. Instead, they just assign it to an available general or admiral and hope for the best.

Another problem is that cutting positions for admirals and generals is complicated by the fact that these are the men and, increasingly, women who make the decisions about who gets cut. Any effort to cut the fat in the senior ranks faces a lot of opposition from the organizations involved as well other flag officers. Leadership and management issues aside, the bean counters know that each senior officer position eliminated will save several million dollars. The salary and benefits for the senior officer is only a small part of this. The big expense is for the staff, fringe benefits and office space required to show the proper respect. But it’s not just about money, it's about leadership, and sometimes less is more.