headquarters

pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)

1. The offices of a commander, as of a military unit, from which orders are issued.
2. A center of operations or administration: The company has its headquarters in the suburbs. See synonyms at center.

USAGE NOTE   The noun headquarters is used with either a singular or a plural verb. The plural is more common: The corporation's headquarters are in Boston. But when reference is to authority rather than to physical location, many people prefer the singular: Division headquarters has approved the new benefits package.

noun

1. A center of organization, supply, or activity: base¹, complex, station. Military installation. See place.
2. A place of concentrated activity, influence, or importance: center, focus, heart, hub, seat. See edge/center.

Headquarters (HQ) The command element of any military unit or organization, originally named after the quarters which housed it. It has numerous functions, the most important the practical command of units and formations, a task facilitated by the rise of the general staff from the 19th century, as part of a process in which headquarters, once consisting of the commander and a small number of aides and mounted messengers, became larger.

For much of history a headquarters was also a royal capital on the move, housing the monarch himself, often with a shoal of officials and flunkies to ensure his efficiency and comfort. The Prussian general staff was so finely honed by the time of the Franco-Prussian war that its chief, Moltke ‘the Elder’, was assisted by just three heads of sections, eleven officers, ten draughtsmen, seven clerks, and 57 other ranks. But this hard-working kernel was embedded in an unwieldy royal headquarters which included civil and military cabinets, Bismarck himself, and foreign office officials together with the war minister and his own staff. And then came a crowd of foreign military observers and an assortment of princelings (Schlachtenbummler) who, as Michael Howard puts it, ‘in days when war was being turned into a science as dreary and exact as economics, still insisted on regarding a campaign as … a royal and seasonal sporting event’. Even when royal spectators had become a thing of the past, higher headquarters still attracted functionaries who often swamped the headquarters' war-fighting element. Although the WW II Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had been conceived of as a small strategic headquarters which would make high-level decisions, it grew to such enormous proportions (including staff responsible, amongst other things, for the Allied military government of occupied territory) that it could not get a forward HQ to Normandy till August 1944, and even then it moved, inexplicably, to Granville on the western coast. It later moved into Versailles, where it took over the Trianon Palace Hotel and another 20, 000 officers and men flooded into the town, leading disgruntled Frenchmen to call SHAEF the Société des Hôteliers Américains en France.

It is no easy task to preserve a balance between a headquarters' war-fighting functions and the numerous administrative tasks which have fallen upon it in an age of mass armies and, most recently, coalition operations in the eye of the media. The Coalition command structure in the Gulf war is a good example of the complexities of a modern headquarters. In 1983, the USA set up US Central Command (CENTCOM), a peacetime headquarters with responsibility for operations in the Persian Gulf area. When the crisis began in 1990, CENTCOM formed the headquarters for the Coalition forces. It had two chains of command, administrative and operational, both under the command of Gen Norman Schwarzkopf, and had responsibility for all four US services as well as the forces contributed by seventeen other nations. This command of such a complex army required tremendous effort from the staff at CENTCOM. For instance, in order to co-ordinate the 1, 820 combat aircraft from eleven different nations striking Iraqi targets, the air command component of CENTCOM issued an ‘air-tasking order’, which grew to 700 pages daily at the height of the bombing campaign.

Traditionally headquarters have often split into forward—or ‘tactical’—and main. The reasons for this separation often concerned communications and reflected a commander's desire to command well forward where he could feel the pulse of operations. Some generals overdid this. In the American civil war one always reported to Lincoln ‘from my headquarters in the saddle’, leading the acerbic president to remark that he evidently had his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be. In North-West Europe in 1944-5 Montgomery commanded from a tiny tactical HQ, supported by good communications and trusted young liaison officers (who acted as his ‘directed telescopes’ to report on what was really happening at the front), leaving his COS to run main headquarters. One of his staff rightly commented on ‘the very real isolation from Main’, and another observed that it was hard for his COS to keep in touch with ‘what Master was thinking’. However, this sort of split will probably help the commanders of the future to retain their grip on the conduct of operations while retaining access to staff support for administrative, political, and media functions, all of which will form part of the legitimate concern of a modern HQ.

Bibliography

• Howard, Michael, The Franco-Prussian War (London, 1968)

— Robert Foley/Richard Holmes

n. the premises occupied by a military commander and the commander's staff.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

IN BRIEF: n. - The military installation from which a commander performs the functions of command; (usually plural) the office that serves as the administrative center of an enterprise;

Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n., -
n. pl. - hovedkvarter

Nederlands (Dutch)
hoofdkantoor, hoofdkwartier, hoofdbureau

Français (French)
n. - (gén, Comm, Admin) siège social, (Mil) quartier général

Deutsch (German)
n. - Hauptquartier, Zentrale

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. pl. - αρχηγείο, επιτελείο, διοικητήριο, στρατηγείο, έδρα, κεντρικά γραφεία (επιχείρησης κ.λπ.)

Italiano (Italian)
quartiere generale, sede centrale, centro operativo

Português (Portuguese)
n. pl. - quartel (m) general

Русский (Russian)
главное управление, штаб-квартира

Español (Spanish)
n. - sede, oficina central, jefatura

Svenska (Swedish)
n. pl. - högkvarter, huvudkontor

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
总部, 总部人员, 司令部

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 總部, 總部人員, 司令部
n. pl. - 總部, 總部人員, 司令部

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 총본부, 활동의 중심, 본부원
n. pl. - 본부, 사령부

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 本部, 本営, 司令部, 本社

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الجمع) مركز القيادة, المركز الرئيسي لمؤسسه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מטה, מפקדה‬
n. pl. - ‮מטה, מפקדה‬

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