Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the first step to turn his rhetoric about bloated senior military ranks into policy on Monday with a memo ordering the services to eliminate at least 20 percent of their active-duty four-star general and flag officer billets, as well as at least 20 percent of all general officer jobs in the National Guard, plus another 10% of general and flag officer billets across the entire military.
The move comes as the Trump administration has been pushing for widespread personnel reductions and realignments across the Defense Department, and days after Hegseth ordered the Army specifically to start cutting senior billets.
“We won World War II with seven four-star generals,” Hegseth said Jan. 14 at his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing. “Today we have 44.…There is an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We do not need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more warfighters empowered at the bottom. So, it is going to be my job…to identify those places where fat can be cut, so it can go toward lethality.”
The Pentagon did not immediately return a request for a list of four-star general billets across the Defense Department’s five services.
Hegseth’s order likely amounts to hundreds of positions being eliminated or reduced in rank, accounting for more than 100 generals and admirals and their staffs. His memo does not specify whether he wants the positions downgraded or simply eliminated, but either scenario would reduce the number of staff in each organization, both uniformed and civilian. The memo sets no deadline for the services to eliminate the jobs, nor does it direct the services to send him a list of proposed cuts.
The 10-percent cut is to be done “with the realignment of the Unified Command Plan,” the memo says. That may be a reference to the Jan. 20 executive order giving U.S. Northern Command a border-protection mission.
The Army, for its part, announced Friday that it would move its Training and Doctrine Command under Army Futures Command, effectively knocking the TRADOC commander down from a four-star bullet.
The service had already been working on eliminating roughly 5 percent of its general officer positions.
As of September 2023, there were 809 active-duty generals and admirals serving in the military, a few dozen below the legal limit of 857. That’s a much lower number than Cold War levels from the 1960s to the 1980s, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, when the military was much larger.
“However, while always very small in comparison to the total force, the GFO corps has increased as a percentage of the total force over the past five decades,” the report found.
