Napoleon’s first department.

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Hello again. Last week I mentioned that a military staff headquarters has distinct staff officer “cells” dedicated to different functions such as operations, logistics, signals, etc. This week I wanted to explain the background of this near-universal system of military functional organisation, as well as alternative systems which have been used. In doing so, we will see how important administration is in modern militaries¹: something that won’t come as a surprise to people with military experience, but might do if your view of the military comes mainly from Hollywood:

In a way, this is the counterpoint to my previous discussion on military lone wolves. When you’re operating alone (which, as I’ve argued, is unrealistic, but let’s park that for a second) you don’t need an administrative apparatus to assist you. The minute you add a team member or two into the mix, however, someone needs to worry about the logistics. Add another few people², and administration rears its ugly head:

And in the spirit of administration, let me remind you (if you haven’t already) to enter your email address on the link below to get weekly updates from me. You can do your bit for the cause by liking and sharing this article with like-minded people you know. And just like in the real military, discussion and dissent is welcome, so please weigh in on the comments section below.

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Most modern militaries follow the “continental” system…

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of squad-level admin, let’s take a step back in time and up in scale. Napoleon’s Grand Armée of the early 1800s was the first to delineate staff responsibilities in the way which is now ubiquitous:

This is the system which was adopted by most Western militaries, including the USA. Unsurprisingly, it is therefore the system which NATO⁴ uses for general staff organisation. Each staff officer is denoted by an alphanumeric code, e.g. G1 for the personnel and administration officer. Each staff officer, in turn, has their own cadre of staff working in their “cell”.

The general staff act as the eyes, ears, hands, and even brain of the commander. They don’t exercise command over the subordinate units, but they do exercise control over these sub-units by acting in the commander’s name⁵. The sub-unit commanders follow the staff officers’ instructions because the staff are acting in the general’s name.

Generals are not the only ones to have staff officers and cells; the idea scales down to individual units and up to entire national military apparatuses:

At each successively higher level, the staff officers have higher ranks and more people working in their cells. Most militaries have relied on some system of rotating officers into and out of alternating staff and command roles throughout their career so that everyone has an appreciation of the challenges of the other, and minimise (although never eliminate) the tensions between the two:

The Prussians were the exception, with a professional cadre of staff officers who were distinct from “line” officers by virtue of special selection and education, although they also served in line units to gain experience. This, no doubt, is what gave rise to Von Moltke’s famous categorization, which I’ve spoken about before in my book review article about Flashman:

…but the “Commonwealth” system still has its adherents

An alternative to the Napoleonic system mentioned above is the “Commonwealth” system of general staff organisation which, as the name suggests, originated within the British military. They no longer use this system, having aligned with the rest of NATO in recent decades (the fact that it’s an American system no doubt made it easier to accept for Brits than something created by the hated French). The rest of the Commonwealth (or former Commonwealth) has followed or is following suit, although there are still some holdouts.

Within the Commonwealth system, the general controls operations and intelligence more directly, with personnel administration and logistics getting their own branches:

The other big difference with the Commonwealth system is that staff officers are more “underpowered” relative to sub-unit commanders (e.g. in the UK, battalion staff officers will be captains or majors, whereas company commanders are always majors. In the US, battalion staff officers are majors and company commanders are captains). Even though the command vs. control relationship is the same in both cases, ranks are important to military folk, so it really matters whether the person telling you what to do is the same, higher, or (God forbid) lower ranked than you:

Administration takes pole position in each system…

Regardless of the system in use, however, it should be clear that the administration branch is at the forefront of the commander’s attention. This is no accident, even though some maintain that the numbering of the staff officer cells are assigned arbitrarily, with no hierarchy.

“Our people are our greatest asset,” was a military maxim long before it became a ubiquitous corporate platitude. To be sure, the aristocratic generals might have deplored and disdained the “brutal and licentious soldiery” (a Wellington classic), but they knew they had to keep them paid, keep them healthy, and, most of all, keep an accurate count of them. This is the job of the G1 staff officer or the Adjutant General: to administer the thousands of people under the general’s command. When the general sits down for a briefing from his/her staff officers, it’s the G1 who goes first. At a unit level, it’s the Adjutant (S1) who controls access to the commander, and whom other officers of equal rank must salute⁶.

This makes sense. Operations are the things which get the job done, but no operations can happen without people. The military logic goes something like this:

This first step of getting your people in order might seem like it should be simple, and indeed it might be for a business doing routine business-y things⁷, but it’s considerably more complicated when your people are dying or getting injured, being transferred into and out of different units, getting promoted to fill gaps, or deserting when no-one’s paying attention. For the staff officers at HQ to get this information accurately, they need good reports coming up all the way from the bottom.

…and the importance of admin filters all the way down

The military obsession with administration is not confined to the higher echelons of staff cadres in higher headquarters. It permeates all the way down as far as the section level, and gets instilled in soldiers from the very outset of their training. During field tactical exercises the commander and second-in-command will spend quite a lot of their time writing and re-writing pro-forma reports to track and administer their soldiers.

Your success as as officer or NCO in small sub-unit tactical operations depends not only on your leadership skills, your physical and mental resilience, your tactical awareness, and your weapons skills. It also depends on your ability to keep track of your little unit’s administration and logistics. You do this by writing out little reports on laminated paper as you go through the stages of the battle. You obsess over how many markers and greaseproof pencils you can attach to your gear, but it’s never enough. What is the secret to writing on soaking wet plastic? There is none, you realise with dismay as you pull out a now-illegible page of smeared blue marker. You’ve lost track of your ORBATT⁸ and now you’re really going to get it in the neck from the instructors.

Or perhaps you spent the whole day on exercise acting as the Platoon Sergeant, and you asked for your soldiers’ “AMMOCAS” (ammunition and casualty) state so many times that you’re dreaming about it. This actually happened during my training: we were all asleep in a billet⁹ in the training camp and a comrade starting screaming out for our “AMMOCAS¹⁰.” We tried telling him to shut up, we tried throwing things at him, but to no avail: his subconscious needed to know. The only way to shut him up was for each of us to shout back “Three magazines, okay”, “Four magazines, okay”, and so on.

Some other routine bits of administration you need to keep on top of in the field are casualty cards, prisoner of war cards, and sentry rosters. That’s not even counting the tactical paperwork such as range cards, patrol orders, contact reports, etc. There’s no getting away from paperwork, even when you’re waist deep in mud and being fired upon. Generally speaking, the commander deals with the “tactical” stuff, and the 2IC¹¹ with the administrative and logistical sides of things.

This, unsurprisingly, is not something which Hollywood spends much time on when depicting military life in the field. When Wade dies in Saving Private Ryan, we see the emotion of the team as they struggle to save his life, the dawning realisation that he’s not going to make it, and Miller taking the letter from his coat pocket. We don’t see them tag him with a casualty card and scratch his name of the ORBATT before dividing up his ammunition and equipment.

Conclusion: Good “Admin” is next to godliness in the military

Being a good platoon sergeant is not about being a warlord. It’s about having good admin. And being a fucking WARLORD!

—The best platoon sergeant I ever served with.

“Admin” takes on a quality of its own in the military which goes far beyond the importance of mere paperwork. “Admin in the field” is military jargon for having your shit together and squared away, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann puts it so eloquently in Full Metal Jacket:

Surviving in the military is about being physically and mentally tough, but it’s also about having the personal and professional organisational ability to manage your own kit and equipment. Being good at admin marks you out for better things, until you find yourself in an office. There you continue to shuffle paperwork efficiently, and this in turn gets noticed by your superiors, and you get put in more consequential administrative roles. The more time you spend at a desk, the better your military resumé looks, and the sooner you get promoted. Gilbert & Sullivan were not too far off the mark with their First Lord of the Admiralty from H.M.S. Pinafore:

Stay close to your desk and never set to sea… and you all may be rulers of the Queen’s navy.

Am I being too cynical? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks, as always, for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe with the link below if you haven’t already. I’ll see you again next week.

Featured Image: “File record room” stock photo from Dreamstime.com

1. I’m using “modern” here in its historical sense, i.e. going back to the 1600s or so. That’s not to say that administration wasn’t important in pre-modern militaries (I’m sure it was), but the modern era saw the birth of formal military general staff systems which are the focus of this article. ↩︎
2. And I literally mean “a few”. Admin is something that happens at a section/squad level, i.e. 9 soldiers. ↩︎
3. Oh okay then, if you really care: 5 is Plans (often merged with 3, Operations), 6 is Signals (communications), 7 is Training (sometimes also merged with the “3” function, at least at lower levels, 8 is Finance, and 9 is Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC). ↩︎
4. Insofar as NATO is still a viable concept; watch this space. ↩︎
5. The distinction between “command” and “control” is something that military folk obsess over to a great extent. To give a very simplified explanation, “command” denotes a legal authority which one person holds over another, with a difference in rank at the heart of it. “Control”, on the other hand, is more of a professional relationship based on two different offices, where rank is less important. An operations officer of a brigade can tell a battalion commander what to do, but only because the brigadier general in command of the brigade has signed his/her name at the bottom of the operations order. ↩︎
6. At least in UK military tradition. ↩︎
7. Although I’ve been shocked since joining “civvy street” at how bad some civilian organisations are at managing information about their people. ↩︎
8. Short for “ORder of BATTle,” this is a card listing all your troops’ names, their army numbers, blood groups, position in the “task org[anisation]”, weapon numbers, and favourite colours. ↩︎
9. “Billet” is army for “Dorm,” but colder and smellier. ↩︎
10. The platoon sergeant and the section second in command is usually responsible for maintaining this document. It’s a list of everyone and their level of ammunition and fitness to fight. “Three magazines, okay,” means that you have three magazines of ammunition left and are uninjured. ↩︎
11. Second-in-command. ↩︎