From The WayBack Machine: The Pentagon's Biggest Overrun: Way Too Many Generals

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http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/5920:the-pentagons-biggest-overrun-way-too-many-generals

The Pentagon's Biggest Overrun: Way Too Many Generals
Thursday, 05 January 2012 04:06 By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will lay out a plan today to cut the Pentagon's budget as required by the White House and the Congress. He isn't happy about it and has complained bitterly in the media about hollowing out the military, and he has had help from the top generals in the Department of Defense (DoD) to give him backup.

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So, how many military brass do we have compared to past years? We have the most ever since World War II. In 1982, when I was running the Project on Military Procurement, one of my sources suggested to me that I do research on how many top officers we had for our troops, planes and ships. My report showed a steady increase since World War II, especially since the number of planes and ships were decreasing due to cost, while the number of generals were increasing. Over the years, my former organization, now known as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) (for full disclosure, I am on POGO's board of directors and serve as treasurer), has redone the report several times, and the brass continues to grow as we get fewer and fewer weapons. The biggest growth was with three- and four-star generals, which POGO has dubbed "star creep." POGO's Ben Freeman recently testified to the Congress in September on how bad the problem had gotten. From his testimony:

The three- and four-star ranks have increased twice as fast as one- and two-star general and flag officers, three times as fast as the increase in all officers and almost ten times as fast as the increase in enlisted personnel. If you imagine it visually, the shape of U.S. military personnel has shifted from looking like a pyramid to beginning to look more like a skyscraper (i.e. higher ranks having fewer lower ranking personnel under them rather than more)....

On average, there are now approximately 185 fewer enlisted personnel per general in the Air Force and 400 fewer enlisted per admiral in the Navy than there were just ten years ago. Similarly, there are more than 40 fewer officers per general or flag officer in both the Air Force and Navy today than there were in 2001.