Army will trim 5% of general-officer jobs in coming years, chief’s spokesman says

More than a dozen Army general officer positions will get the axe in the coming years, a spokesman for Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George tells Defense One.

The revelation comes a week after Defense One published an opinion piece calling the Army “too top-heavy.” As it turns out, the service’s top officer agrees. 

“There are general officer billets across the Army that Gen. George, in collaboration with the secretary and staff, has determined are not essential for the Army,” said Col. Dave Butler, George’s spokesman.

George isn’t ready to announce the exact positions, Butler said, but he has been reviewing possibilities since he stepped into his job in September 2023. The Army is authorized a total of 219 general officer positions, so declining to fill 12 of them would represent more than a 5 percent cut.

Butler said he got in touch with the piece’s author, R.D. Hooker, Jr., to let him know that the service’s most senior officer agrees that there are too many generals on staff at the Pentagon, and too many staff organizations in the Army.

“I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Butler that he was thinking along the same kind of lines,” Hooker said. “Now, whether getting after this in a meaningful way in the tenure of a single chief—who’s already, you know, at least a year in—is doable or not is an interesting question.”

George is very much working on the issue, Butler confirmed. Not only among the general officer corps, but down to the field-grade level.

There are, for example, brigades in the Army that have only one battalion under them and maybe two companies under that, necessitating four headquarters staff for two operational units.

One such brigade, the Germany-based 18th Military Police Brigade, has just the 709th Military Police Battalion under it.

“We as an Army have to ask ourselves, you know, is that the most effective use of organizational bureaucracy?” Butler said. 

Some of the Army’s general-officer creep might be a consequence of a glut of midgrade officers, Butler suggested.

The Army recruits thousands of lieutenants each year to fill its most junior officer roles. At the same time, a phenomenon called “grade plate increase”—where responsibilities previously held by staff captains are increasingly being done by major and lieutenant colonels—has required the Army to promote more junior officers than it traditionally has. 

And in the meantime, those junior officers are languishing in their first assignments.

“This happened to my older son. His first year as a lieutenant was spent working in an [operations] shop, instead of being a platoon leader,” Hooker said. “So that essential development opportunity is lost. And everywhere you go in the Army, you’ve got six lieutenants sitting around on the battalion staff, which is just crazy, right?”

There isn’t a specific plan to get that creep under control, but it’s on the radar, Butler said.

“And you know, the number of majors has increased over the years for reasons we can’t specifically identify, but that’s just what’s happened,” he said. “And so Gen. George’s intent is to get back to where we’re trusting captains to do the jobs of captains.”

The second Trump administration has an opportunity to do some trimming across the services, said Hooker, who argues that bloated three- and four-star ranks are not just an Army problem.

“I expect all kinds of chaos to be coming out of the incoming administration, but one way to get after it would be to sell whoever the new secretary is on this idea that we’re just really overweight,” he said.