general staff

n. (Abbr. GS)
A group of military officers charged with assisting the commander of a division or higher unit in planning, coordinating, and supervising operations.

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The term general staff evokes a number of differing images from the bungling red tabs of the British army of WW I to the seemingly ultra-efficient red-striped German staff machine of two world wars. The first, a picture of caricature, contrasts awkwardly with a more envious perception of a Prussian military élite. In 1890 Spenser Wilkinson titled his plea for the adoption of a German style general staff in the British army the Brain of an Army. Nearly one hundred years later, Col T. N. Dupuy ascribed the German army's relative success to their general staff, and claimed in A Genius for War that he had discovered the secret of ‘institutionalizing military excellence’.

The requirement for a general staff is functional. While staff officers were progressively introduced into armies from the times of Gustavus Adolphus, the requirement for a specialist staff grew as armies increased greatly in size in the early 19th century. Generals could no longer direct personally all formations on the battlefield or attend to supporting administration. Therefore the work of the staff became essential for detailed planning, organization, supply, and the transmission of orders. In war ministries staff officers helped the C-in-C prepare campaign plans. In the field, they assisted him and his principal subordinates with operational decision-making. Development of the ‘staff system’ thus progressed on two related levels of war: strategic and tactical. Later, work of general staff officers underpinned the intermediate operational level of war.

The Prussian system became the model for the rest of the world. It was based on the QMG staff of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose functions had widened from supply to encompass military engineering including fortification and cartography (see maps). Building on the reforming work of Scharnhorst, the Allgemeine Kriegsschule (General War Academy) was opened in Berlin in 1810; Clausewitz became superintendent in 1818. With common instruction, doctrine, and outlook, the graduates were dispersed throughout the Prusso-German army to provide continuity of tactical thought and practice. The office of ‘COS’ became increasingly important, particularly in continental armies. The period 1813-15 saw also a number of effective command and staff ‘partnerships’ in the Prussian army between chiefs of staff and their respective commanders, contrasting with the approach adopted by British and French commanders such as Wellington and Napoleon who used their staffs more as a secretariat, or as ‘directed telescopes’.

After the Napoleonic wars, the Prussians began to differentiate formally between the Truppengeneralstab (general staff officers working at higher formation level) and those employed in the central, Grosser Generalstab (Great General Staff), responsible for war planning and organization, including mobilization. Under Moltke ‘the Elder’ the Prussians continued to lead development. He was responsible for increasing the prestige of the CGS after he assumed this office in 1857. He selected twelve talented pupils a year from the war academy and supervised their instruction with ‘ruthless efficiency’. After training, the young but highly trained general staff officers were dispatched to various parts of the Prusso-German army. The resulting cohesion and concomitant contribution to that army's fighting power played a major part in Moltke's success in wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. Schlieffen continued this personal commitment to professional development with annual Stabsreisen (staff rides) to educate, train, and ultimately test commanders and their staffs before WW I. Meanwhile, in the staff colleges of France, Great Britain, Russia, and the USA the influence of Napoleon's practical example and of Jomini dominated—notwithstanding the Prusso-German success in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The German shift from theory towards a more practical approach in the training of officers was only partially emulated elsewhere.

Implicit in the German approach, and one which was retained throughout two world wars and survives to some extent in the present-day Bundeswehr, is that the general staff officer at any level is always regarded as a Führergehilfe, an aide to the commander. The commander, in turn, has a duty to consult and involve, for example, his COS in decision-making. Originally designed by Moltke to impose some order on the monarchical commanders-in-chief of the armies of the contributing German states, the general staff system was found to be so effective that it was developed further in the Reichswehr (despite the formal abolition of the general staff at the Treaty of Versailles) and Wehrmacht eras. Even in the dark days of 1944, general staff trainees received sufficient education and preparation (over nine months) at both the tactical and operational levels such that they could take over the reins of command in the absence of their commander. The existence of a unified general staff system in the Prussian (and later in the German) army contributed much to German professional military competence and success, particularly at the higher tactical and operational levels of conflict. Nonetheless, no staff system can recompense for higher level failings in the grand and military strategic direction of a war, as the German defeats in two world wars demonstrate.

In contrast, the British experience has been somewhat ambivalent. After WW I Hamilton wrote: ‘the term General Staff is something of a pitfall for the unprofessional professor or amateur war correspondent. Even now, after the war G. S. remain to some extent an exotic pair of capitals in England.’ In 1944, the view expressed by Liddell Hart in Thoughts on War was more critical: ‘The General Staff was truly … an all-powerful military priesthood, linked by ties of intellectual and professional comradeship. A corps of directors, a society within a society, they were to the German army what the Jesuits at their political zenith were to the church of Rome.’

Wellington's staff work was shared among a military secretary, the adjutant general, and the QMG. By the time of the Crimean war this system had been shown to be incapable of supporting the ever more complex demands of command in war. Despite the establishment of a staff college at Camberley in 1858, reform of the regimental system, and reorganization of the War Office under Cardwell, progress in Britain towards the formation of a general staff remained slow. The Hartington Commission of 1890 and the writings of Spenser Wilkinson did little to improve matters as the trail of military incompetence in the Second Boer War demonstrated. What had proved good enough for imperial control was found seriously wanting in South Africa.

The creation of a general staff followed the recommendations of the Esher Committee in 1904. After a couple of years of hard work Special Army Order 233 of 12 September 1906 set out its purpose: ‘To advise on the strategical distribution of the army, to supervise the education of officers, and the training and preparation of the army for war, to study military schemes, offensive and defensive, to collect and collate military intelligence, to direct the general policy in army matters, and to secure continuity of action in the execution of that policy.’

However, this War Office-based general staff was concerned only with intelligence, training, and military operations. The old military secretary and administrative and QMG departments branches survived at all levels. A fundamental question which split the War Office remained unresolved: was it to be the man or the job which had general staff status? Further, the opportunity, envisaged by Haldane, to modernize the staff across the British army was eclipsed by efforts of grander design to create the post of the CGS (from 1907, CIGS) and by the army's belated attempts to impose a tactical doctrine in the Field Service Regulations (FSR).

Haldane envisaged a wider role for the general staff than the compilation and revision of manuals such as FSR. Its directors would also ‘test ideas in Staff Rides and advise or umpire at peacetime manoeuvres’, ‘raise the intellectual standard of the army’, and ‘through Staff Rides and tests, assess the aptitudes of officers for the duties of high command’. Many of these innovations were followed through before WW I, including staff tours, as the rides were sometimes called then, and general staff conferences were held at Camberley. In the face of opposition from many vested interests, the pace of reform proved impossible to sustain and even the staff rides and conferences lacked the vigour of their German models. Sir Ian Hamilton, reporting on the German imperial manoeuvres of 1909, ‘remarked upon the seriousness with which the Germans viewed their conferences with fewer speakers and lasting much longer than the British equivalents’. Ideas like accelerated promotion for Staff College graduates provoked an outcry among the more traditional elements of the British army; so did internecine arguments over the status of the past staff college (psc) qualification—were all Staff College graduates to get one, or did it depend on performance?

The British general staff, as far as it was formed, was far better than anything that existed before as its doctrine, professional standard of field training, and the smooth mobilization and deployment of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France and Belgium in 1914 demonstrated. But the British adopted only a pale copy of the German system; furthermore it lacked 100 years of steady development and expert fashioning at the hands of Helmuth von Moltke and Alfred von Schlieffen. That said, Haldane had much to be pleased with in the immediate pre-war years: the efficiency of the regular army (at unit level at least) reached new heights and the Territorial Army was founded. However, much of the substantial progress made in doctrine, training, and organization before WW I was lost in the bloody afterglow of victory: the general staff was debased, its embellishments stripped, and its function undermined. Fuller was no unthinking admirer of the German system. Looking back on WW I he declared: ‘Where the German system went wrong was that it superimposed a committee of irresponsible non-fighting officers on the general, creating a staff hegemony which virtually obliterated generalship. If the general was a tiger, his staff officers were selected from the lambs; if he was lamblike, then they were chosen for their tigerishness.’

Yet Fuller also recognized the potential strengths of a general staff if it were properly controlled. He concluded in Generalship: Its Diseases and their Cure: ‘No soldier can doubt the immense value of a general staff if it is the general's servant, and not the general's gaoler.’ Despite valuable staff training conducted at Camberley, Haifa, and Quetta prior to WW II, the British army soldiered on without a fully fledged general staff. There was little opportunity to provide the doctrinal foundation and preparation for high command which all German general staff officers received. Despite the writings of Liddell Hart and Fuller, the systematic intellectual stimulus from the top downwards on the lines of the Reichswehr COS Seeckt was missing in the British army. The difficulties in establishing an authoritative COS—the principal general staff officer in a headquarters—is instructive. Of British higher commanders of WW II, only Montgomery created a ‘true’ field COS, de Guingand. Monty made his innovation of a COS under the pressures of wartime command to free him, the higher commander, from meddling in the business of the staff. It allowed him ‘time to think’ and sleep. After WW II, apart from the introduction of chiefs of staff into higher level headquarters against some opposition, little changed in the British staff system. Courses of instruction at Camberley stressed ‘staff duties’ rather than the development of strategic thinking and operational concepts on war college lines. Not until the 1970s did Camberley title its principal course as ‘command and staff’. While the British army reluctantly adopted NATO staff nomenclature in 1981, little of substance changed in either the organization or running of the staff. Yet with the establishment of an army higher command and staff course in 1988, which became fully joint (tri-service) in 1998, perhaps the foundations of a true general staff ethos have been laid.

In the 19th century other countries apart from Britain monitored Prusso-German developments and established general staffs and institutions for staff training. The French, for example, had created a high-level staff titled the Corps d'État-Major de l'Armée in 1783. The French Revolution brought no lasting improvements to either the organization or status of the staff. French military prowess during the Napoleonic wars rested rather on her impressive manpower resources and generalship. The lack of a staff system began to be felt during the Crimean war but only the defeat during the 1870 war against Prussia signalled the urgent need for reform. By the turn of the 19th century France had organized her general staff into three main bureaux, responsible for: organization, discipline, military justice, and supply; enemy information (the deuxième bureau) ; and orders, movement, and preparation for combat. In 1917 a fourth bureau was added and made responsible for transportation, supply, and the employment of labour units. This grouping of four principal staff divisions within a formation headquarters contrasted with the British system of a ‘general’ staff responsible for intelligence, operations, and training (or ‘G’ branch) and separate administrative and QM staffs (‘A’ and ‘Q’ branches respectively).

During the 19th century progress towards the formation of general staff in the USA was slow, as in Britain. In 1864 Pres Abraham Lincoln had reorganized the Union army headquarters in Washington under the direction of the Secretary for War and the overall commander of the armies. But this arrangement left Grant as a commanding general in the field and Halleck, a former general-in-chief, as COS of the army back in Washington. Grant's own field headquarters staff was about twenty officers strong, including a COS, two military secretaries, two assistant adjutants general, and a chief QM. The Confederate States Army notoriously paid considerably less attention to staff work.

The major impetus towards modernization of the staff came in the wake of the Spanish-American war and the Philippines insurrection. The father of the American general staff was Elihu Root who was Secretary of War in 1899-1904. His influence was as profound as was that of Haldane in Britain. Once a path had been set, progress in the USA was typically fast. A general order in November 1901 provided for a General Services and Staff College to be established at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and an Army War College Board at Washington. These two institutions later became the US Army Command and General Staff College (still at Leavenworth) and the Army War College (now at Carlisle, Pennsylvania). Equally significantly, on 14 February 1902 Root submitted a bill to Congress proposing the establishment of a central general staff.

As passed, the Dick Act of 1903 created a General Staff Corps. Its function, derived from the German Bronsart von Schellendorf's General Staff Duties, was ‘to prepare plans for the national defence and for the mobilization of the military forces in time of war; to investigate and report upon all questions affecting the efficiency of the army and its state of preparation for military operations; to render professional aid and assistance to the Secretary of War and to general officers and other superior commanders’.

Yet these duties only dealt with the higher direction of the army in peacetime. When Pershing sailed for France in 1917 as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), one of his tasks was to form a staff fit for war. After examining the British and French systems, Pershing decided on the French, meeting the need for ease of co-ordination with higher and adjacent French headquarters. The staff system adopted, which provided for a general staff organization down to divisional level, was thus an accident of history. Yet it proved its worth and was used by the USA throughout WW II and was adopted subsequently, with minor modifications, by most NATO armies. In 1918 an American staff consisted of five sections, titled G1-G5: G1 dealt with administration, including personnel; G2 was responsible for intelligence; G3 dealt with operations; G4 with supply matters; and G5 with instruction and training. In WW II, G5 became responsible for civil affairs, and is now of particular importance in humanitarian and peace support operations.

Today we see the growing importance of joint staffs in western armed forces. While there is no direct equivalent of a unified army general staff, a process of integration has been accelerated by parallel developments in naval and air staffs and by joint staff training. Navy staffs have adopted an organization of ‘N’ prefixed branches while their air force counterparts have ‘A’ staffs. Joint staff divisions are prefaced ‘J’ in NATO and in many national headquarters. The joint staff organization owes its origins to the Franco-American system. Whereas J1-J4 equate to the old G1-G4 sections, J5 is responsible for plans, J6 for communications and information systems, J7 for doctrine and training, J8 for budgets and finance, and J9 for civil affairs. The role of the COS remains crucial in relieving the commander from a mass of detail and in co-ordinating the work of joint and ever more complex staff dealing in three environments: sea, land, and air.

Bibliography

• Dupuy, T. N., A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945 (Fairfax, Va., 1984)
• Gooch, John, The Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy 1900-1916 (London, 1974).
• Görlitz, Walter, History of the German General Staff (New York, 1953) (trans. from German orig.).
• Holborn, Hajo, ‘The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff’, in Paret, Peter (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (London, 1986).
• Spiers, Edward M., Haldane: An Army Reformer (Edinburgh, 1980).
• Wilkinson, Spenser, The Brain of an Army (London, 1890)

— Mungo Melvin

A group of officers in the headquarters of U.S. Army or U.S. Marine divisions, Marine brigades and aircraft wings, or similar units, responsible for assisting their commanders in planning, coordinating, and overseeing operations, and may include four or more functional sections: personnel (G-1), military intelligence (G-2), operations and training (G-3), logistics (G-4), and, in Army organizations, civil affairs/military governments (G-5). In Army and Marine brigades and smaller units (unit staff), or a Marine unit smaller than an aircraft wing (executive staff), staff sections are designated S-1, S-2, and so on. The parallel staff in the U.S. Air Force lies in the wing and units larger, and has units designated personnel, operations, and so forth. G-2 and G-3 Air are Army officers assigned at division, corps, and headquarters level to help plan and coordinate joint operations involving ground and air units. Naval staffs are rarely organized in a way comparable to these, but are designated N-1, N-2, and so on when they are. Similarly, a joint staff would be designated J-1, J-2, and so on.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

(DOD) A group of officers in the headquarters of Army or Marine divisions, Marine brigades, and aircraft wings, or similar or larger units that assist their commanders in planning, coordinating, and supervising operations. A general staff may consist of four or more principal functional sections: personnel (G-1), military intelligence (G-2), operations and training (G-3), logistics (G-4), and (in Army organizations) civil affairs and military government (G-5). (A particular section may be added or eliminated by the commander, dependent upon the need that has been demonstrated.) The comparable Air Force staff is found in the wing and larger units, with sections designated personnel, operations, etc. G-2 Air and G-3 Air are Army officers assigned to G-2 or G-3 at division, corps, and Army headquarters level who assist in planning and coordinating joint operations of ground and air units. Naval staffs ordinarily are not organized on these lines, but when they are, they are designated N-1, N-2, etc. Similarly, a joint staff may be designated J-1, J-2, etc. In Army brigades and smaller units and in Marine Corps units smaller than a brigade or aircraft wing, staff sections are designated S-1, S-2, etc., with corresponding duties; referred to as a unit staff in the Army and as an executive staff in the Marine Corps. See also staff.