Stars in Their Eyes - Why the UK needs more 2* Officers now...

In a letter to the Times on 29 December, the Chief of the General Staff Sir Nick Carter claimed that he had reduced the number of 1* and above appointments in the Army by 40% since taking up his post. This is the latest intervention in ‘The War On Stars’, a long running and perhaps uniquely British view that any senior officer is a bad thing, and that where possible we should get rid of lots of them, and spend the savings on something else instead.

The challenge is far more difficult than just saying ‘lets get rid of 10% of all manpower at 1* level’ though. It has wide reaching consequences, and needs to be done carefully to avoid impacting across a range of key Defence issues.

In simple terms, Officers at the rank of 1* and above could be said to do posts that encompass the following concepts:

a.       Command Formations / Units / Organisations

b.       Manage Programmes / Directorates / Capabilities

c.        Represent UK interests abroad

This simple breakdown tries to capture that at this level a senior officer is responsible for exercising command of large military formations, delivering major programmes or leading representational duties for the UK abroad. These three drivers are intertwined, and an officer may well find themselves doing all three in a single posting (for example the 3* RAF Officer in Riyadh who heads up the MODSAP project).

A 1* officer will generally be expected to exercise leadership over large groups, often of thousands of people, or manage programmes running into the hundreds of millions, if not billions of pounds (e.g. the Type 45 programme was led by a Brigadier for many years). At 2* level, they will be taking on service wide responsibility for delivery of an entire capability (such as Rear Admiral Submarines), or senior leadership roles – such as command of a Division. By 3* officers are expected to deliver very high level leadership, setting direction, decision taking on broad porfolios (such as the entire maritime procurement area) or commanding an entire front command (such as NAVY, LAND, AIR etc).

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

At every level they are expected to adopt increased levels of responsibility, and own ever more complex challenges. They not only have to lead, but also act as duty holders and regulatory owners for safety cases, are required to be accountable to Parliament when appropriate and have significant financial authority delegated to them to approve spending of public money.

These jobs require a significant amount of experience that can only be gained by many years working in relevant areas. You would not, for instance, appoint someone to command the Submarine Service unless they had significant prior experience at every level of submarine operations. Otherwise their ability to make decisions, set direction and lead their people is significantly impacted.

There are also very, very few senior appointments relative to the size of the Armed Forces. The Naval Service, including regulars, reservists, RFA and Royal Marines totals approximately 35,000 people. There are roughly 30-35 Admirals & Generals in the Service, of whom less than 15 are involved in the Admiralty Board. In other words, 2* officers and above make up 0.1% of the total manpower of the Naval Service.

Even if you stretched the definition of ‘Senior’ to what is known as the ‘OF5’ level (Captain, Colonel and Group Captain), you still only have have approximately 200 Captains and 70-80 Commodores. All told, the total senior level manpower structure for a 35,000 person globally deployed workforce encompassing maritime, aviation, land operations, nuclear propulsion/weapons and all the underpinning complex industrial, engineering and infrastructure needs to keep it operating 24/7/365 still makes up less than 1% of the entire workforce – which is pretty lean by any reasonable standard.

Why not scrap posts?

The impact of scrapping posts, or ‘de-enriching them’ down from say 1* to OF5 is that it can have a lot of wider repercussions beyond just the short term financial savings. This can in turn cause major issues for military manpower planners, and delivery of UK objectives.

To generate a 2* Admiral requires roughly 30 years of naval experience across a wide range of jobs and roles to ensure that someone taking up the post has the right breadth of experience and understanding to carry out their duties. If you were to map the career path out for a SubLieutenant Bloggs graduating BRNC Dartmouth today, you would see that for Bloggs to reach 2*, they would need to be appointed to certain roles at certain times and in certain ranks.

If you descope some of the 2* posts, you have to look back into the system and identify how you can still keep a credible career path open that gets someone with the right experience. Do you derank other jobs (for instance, if command of a ship is required, do you reduce this from an OF5 to an SO1 command), or if project management is needed, do you reduce the levels where people can go to these roles – and if so, how do you ensure a more junior officer is credible in managing a project that a more senior officer used to lead on?  The danger of downgrading too heavily is that its effects are felt backwards through the entire system.

You also have to consider the impact on the career plot more widely. The military remains a closed recruiting system – the sole point of entry is as a junior officer. Manpower planners for the SO1 and OF5 jobs have a pool of people with 20-25 years experience, and if they leave, cannot replenish them from outside, instead having to bear gaps in the system.

Most military officers know their career aspirations and paths they wish to follow, and also know the roles they’d like to take on. It is common to talk to an officer and hear a carefully mapped out trajectory of preferred postings, intended to help secure promotion up to their goal.

Reduced availability of more senior posts is felt further down the chain because it reduces the opportunity for promotion. If as a branch manager you have to help manage a career plot to ensure you are generating three Captains, two Commodores and a Rear Admiral for your branch, you are essentially running three to four different career streams below that, to help ensure you have always got candidates trickling through, gaining experience and pushing for the next rank.

This trickle effect means people always have a range of jobs to go for. But, if you downgraded this requirement to two Captains and a Commodore to reduce senior ranks, suddenly you’ve halved the career progression opportunities, without a commensurate reduction in manpower further down.  What this means is competition for postings increases, and plenty of good, possibly average officers may suddenly decide that they stand no credible chance of progression and walk away.

Friends of Humphrey described how they saw one area downgrade its most senior post from a 1* to an OF5. The impact has been extremely damaging, as the savings made were quickly wiped out when the SO1 cadre, which had previously seen a career path up to 1* suddenly realised they would be capped at OF5, and that only one of them could do it at a time. It didn’t take a maths genius to realise that if you have (for example) 15 officers at SO1, and now only one posting at OF5, then very few of them would ever be promoted again. They walked away in larger than expected numbers, reasoning that they had no future left in the Service, and instead there is now a serious issue with manpower availability of experienced people. 

Promotion is integral to human drivers – people want to be recognised for their work, rewarded for their efforts and enjoy the change of status that comes from a new title or rank. If you run a closed shop workforce, then promotion is essential to keep new blood coming up through the system and preventing ‘bed blocking’ of roles. If you reduce the senior roles, but not the mid management roles, then you end up with a manning bulge at the SO2/SO1 level, where people cannot get promoted out, thus reducing opportunities to promote people up through the system without creating new jobs for them.

Reduction in high level jobs can quickly have unintended consequences like this, preventing people three or four ranks down from being promoted because the people above them that should have promoted, were unable to do so because there was no jobs for them to go to anymore.

This is coupled with the challenge of retaining specialist and highly trained manpower. It is sometimes said that the best Generals the Army has leave it as Lieutenant Colonels at 40. This means that the best and brightest talent emerges from a command tour, realises there is a long time in the wilderness to come in thankless jobs before Brigade or Divisional command looms in 15-20 years time and promptly leave to go to industry where their leadership, experience and contacts are keenly sought after.

If you diminish career prospects across the military, you make the battle for talent retention even harder. Who in their right mind, post Command, would stay if they knew that they would never be promoted again for 15-20 years? You cannot bring in under the current system experienced leaders at senior levels, and if they go, then you’ve lost 20 years of investment with nothing to show for it. A job title may not sound much, and the sheer existence of plenty of Brigadiers may infuriate some, but it needs to be seen as much as a carrot to retain the best Majors and Lieutenant Colonels as it is about keeping senior positions in Whitehall.

What Do They Do All Day?

It is a common misconception held over from popular culture that senior officers are inept, bumbling and clueless about their surroundings. Borderline alcoholic, and probably unable to find their way home without a hand, they are kept on the straight and narrow by tireless staff officers and plucky aides, before they retire home to their large Service homes where they are waited on hand and foot. Aaaaah, the life of a soldier…

In reality the lot of the modern 2* is pretty brutal and demanding. The taxpayer expects value for money from these people, and deservedly gets it. The last military 2* that Humphrey worked for is a good example of this – they held down three roles, each of which require significant amounts of pre-reading and awareness on key issues. They were in the office for an average of 13 hours per day plus on call (and usually working on) their blackberry over the weekend. They had evening engagements ranging from official functions to attending as a guest of honour somewhere. Over all of this they had responsibility for a diverse, challenging and extremely expensive portfolio, with a responsibility running into the billions of pounds. (For detailed information on what all MOD 1* and above do, this LINK gives a very good breakdown).

For this they were paid approximately £120k per year, with no house or retinue. They also had to fly economy class flights and stay in the cheapest hotel possible – there were no benefits, stock options or other ‘nice to haves’ attached that industry would recognise as a reward for a roughly 80-90 hour working week and with responsibility for hundreds of staff and billions of pounds of equipment.

The big challenge with senior officers is trying to balance off the empowerment of juniors with the natural hierarchical tendency to want someone more senior to take a decision. The military abhors the concept of ‘primus inter pares’, instead preferring a more senior individual to take the decision for them.

The challenge with reducing the number of senior officers is that in many cases the work that they did hasn’t gone away. Its possibly done differently, or split up among other business areas, but fundamentally it still needs someone to own and take responsibility for it. For all the talk of downwards empowerment, it still seems that the MOD excels at finding someone more senior to actually take the decision for you. 

For the military, the biggest challenge is finding the bandwidth to get a senior officer to have time to fully grasp their portfolio and understand all the issues in it. There is, paradoxically a shortage of 2*s to own problems. Humphrey found that in his case, his 2* was often so wrapped up in wider work that when you could get a meeting on a key issue, you spent so long going over the basics of the subject, that the thinking and decision making was highly compressed.

Reduced bandwidth does not mean better decisions get taken. It means that decisions are taken on scanty knowledge or hasty briefs, and does not always mean that the right outcome happens. Overloading tired busy people with more work in an ideologically driven move to reduce senior officers will not make staffwork better, it just reduces the space that is needed to really look at problems and deliver leadership. Humphreys experience is that the busier the 2* or above, the less time they have to actually lead, and in fact they are beholden to their outer office to go from meeting to meeting, talking from hastily prepared briefing notes without necessarily having the space required to really look at a problem in detail.

It may sound paradoxical, but perhaps the solution is not less senior officers, but more of them. It would ease pressures in some areas – for instance many nations are obsessed with ranks and protocol – they would see a visit by a 4* Admiral as being of value, but a visit by a 2* Admiral as being an insult and would field their second or third tier team to meet and greet them. If you want access to other nations senior decision makers, you need to be prepared to field your own seniors too.

In the UKs case, there were some concerns expressed by Staff Officers when the Levene Review was implemented, taking away the three 4* Commander in Chief roles and downgrading them to 3*. This eliminated three officers who could be used very effectively on wider international engagement and defence diplomacy roles, because they had a suitably empowered 3* led HQ to run the show while they were away, leaving the Service Chiefs to manage in London. By contrast the current model places almost unsustainable pressure on the Service Chiefs, and has arguably proved damaging to UK defence engagement interests.

Perhaps an easier solution would be twofold. Firstly, to maintain senior officer levels as they are at the moment, providing a credible career path to keep the best talent engaged with the system and inside it for the long haul. The second solution may be to look to emulate the model used by Germany and the Danes (among many others) of the concept of the Senior Commander role (essentially it is a 3.5 striped rank tab) to fill the gap between Commander and Captain. Then over time the potential may exist to descope some Commodore and Captain jobs, while still maintaining a credible career stream for junior officers.

Such a suggestion is not without precedent, after all the rank of Lieutenant Commander was introduced to recognise the gap between the two ranks, and reward the more senior Lieutenants. A similar move here would have long term benefits, but come at the cost of enraging many who would see it not as a means of keeping talent in the system, but as a bloated set of individuals feathering their own nest. The reaction from the tabloids would kill such a move before it started.

Instead what is likely to continue is the long standing policy in the UK of being suspicious of the senior ranks and trying to work out how to get rid of them, and not working out why they are a superb and very cost effective asset to the taxpayer. A century after WW1 ended, the UK has not yet come to terms with, nor abolished the ridiculous notion of ‘lions led by donkeys’ and embraced, not continued to revile, the Officer class.