Like many bureaucracies, the US Army has a plethora of generals running an organization that is far from its maximum historical size. Those generals all need staff, the staff need working space, transportation, support staff of their own, etc. Multiply that a few times and you get stories like this:
Gates rattled off examples of costly bureaucracy inside the military, as well. A simple request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan must be reviewed and assessed at multiple high-level headquarters before it can be deployed to the war zone. “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?” Gates said to reporters Friday.
The Armorer gets to the real point of the story, rather than the one Gates thinks he’s making:
I’ll just take this statement: “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?”
And say — “Gee, Mr. Secretary, I can’t believe that a decision on a guy and a dog has to get to you.”
If you’re making those kinds of decisions, that’s just another reason the Services have put that many Generals in the loop.
This is what, in the private sector, is called micromanagement and it’s generally thought to be a bad thing, and a sign of incompetent leadership. What’s it called in the US Army?
