The Navy Has As Many Admirals as Ships

Frontpage mag ^ | May 15, 2025 | Daniel Greenfield

[george76]

And the Air Force has a general for every 22 planes..

The US Navy has under 300 ships and under 300 admirals. The ratio of one admiral to one ship seems absurd but of the hundreds of admirals in the Navy, few actually command ships.

Take Rick ‘Rachel’ Levine, the transgender health secretary of Pennsylvania, whose previous naval experience had been limited to cruises to the Bahamas, who was commissioned as a four-star admiral by the Biden administration making him both the first transgender four-star admiral, and the first four-star female admiral or the first four-star female impersonator.

While Rick Levine’s admiralty was particularly absurd, there are four rear admirals commanding the Navy medical corps, including a rear admiral in command of the US Navy Dental Corps and another rear admiral who serves as the chief of the nursing corps along with four more rear admirals in the reserves. (Not counting the president’s doctor who is also a rear admiral.)

The JAG corps, made famous by a CBS TV show which gave people a very wrong impression of the actual JAG workday and armaments, has four rear admirals. This sort of thing adds up.

The Army had 267 various generals (as of 2023, these numbers fluctuate) to 10 divisions. That’s 26 generals to a division. That’s nearly double what it was during WWII. The Marines have 85.

The Air Force has 241 making for a ratio of around 1 general to 22 aircraft.

Even the relatively newly spun off Space Force has 24 general officers. The Space Force has less than 10,000 ‘Guardians’ across six bases making for a ratio of one general officer to 416 Space Force ‘Guardians’ and four general officers to a base.

These are some reasons why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has suggested cuts are badly needed. The US Navy is woefully behind on shipbuilding and maintenance, and the service has struggled with its varied missions, but the one thing it’s not short of is admirals. The same is true for the other branches of the military which struggle with performance, but not with top brass.

Hegseth has proposed cutting 20% of the 37 four-star officers and 10% of the over 800 flag and general officers. As he and others have pointed out, there are more than twice as many four-stars today as there were during WWII even as the force size shrank by over 80%.

It’s not a new idea.

While Democrats reflexively protested the move, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposed similar steps under Obama with limited results. Proposals to trim down the upper ranks surface from time to time and go nowhere. The people at the top got there by building political relationships with elected officials, higher ranks, lobbyists and industry figures.

Some might reasonably assume that this growth took place after 9/11, but the actual number of general officers only rose from a total of 871 to 874 from 2000 to 2005. But in the first year of Obama, there were 981 general officers. The number of four-stars hit a high under Obama that had not been seen since the 1970s. The officer corps as a whole decreased, but the administration overhead increased in the military. And across the government.

The truly meaningful number is not the total number of brass but the ratio of brass to the rest of the force. During WWII, there was an officer for every ten enlisted men. The ratio is now approaching 1 officer for every 5 servicemembers. General officers made up only 0.048% of the force ratio in 1965. Today it’s 0.0630%. And the number has been steadily growing.

Critics of Hegseth’s planned cuts claim that we need growing administrative overhead to function, but the military functions far worse with this level of overhead than it once did. Apart from the financial burden, the chain of command has become diluted, the power of ranks have diminished and so have individual responsibility and accountability for military failures.

From 9/11 to Benghazi to the retreat from Afghanistan, no one has paid the price for military setbacks, and efforts to understand what went wrong have run into a wall of brass who all followed orders and none of whom are willing to take responsibility for initiating anything.

“To cut this amount from the senior ranks of the military, I think will impact military readiness,” Brigadier General Cary Chun, who among his other duties served as a White House social aide, argued and warned that limiting the number of positions that young officers can achieve could impact their morale. But is that kind of careerism remotely sustainable for a fighting force?

Making the military more appealing to certain kinds of candidates requires more room at the top, but as the ratio shows, there’s more root at the top than there is in the middle. Newly enlisted soldiers live on food stamps while the ranks of generals and admirals keep on swelling.

Men die in the desert while earning less than they would working in an Amazon warehouse while the brass socialize in D.C. and try to figure out why they have a recruitment problem.

Administrative bloat is not just the military’s problem: it’s America’s problem.

The number of college administrators shot up 452% from the seventies to today. Top schools have 1 faculty member to 11 students and 1 administrator to 4 students. Healthcare administrative bloat has turned medical institutions into bureaucracies while driving away doctors. There are now an estimated 10 bureaucrats to every doctor and most of our health care spending goes to service that perpetually expanding health care bureaucracy.

Wokeness further bloated HR departments at major companies where everything the corporation did suddenly revolved around ‘equity’ and HR’s DEI initiatives.

But if there’s any place where we really can’t afford wokeness, it’s the military.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center took on military bloat and wokeness before it was popular with our exclusive investigations, Disloyal: How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen and Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country as part of our larger project to reform the military. We’ve heard from the future secretary of defense about his vision long before anyone expected him to rise to such a position.

Veterans voted for Trump by a massive margin because they knew that reforms were needed.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth is implementing the reforms that the military desperately needs, that veterans and active duty personnel want and that will secure our future national defense.

[Red Badger]

Wasn’t Buttigieg a Rear Admiral?...............Oh, wait, that was a Rear Admirer.......

[Secret Agent Man]

If they know they are pretending, they are drag queens and read stories to kids at libraries.

If they dont, they call themselves transgendered and the joke is they want you to take them seriously.

For women if they know they are pretending, they are Peter Pan or Victor Victoria. If they don’t, you deal with a someone looking like Ellen DeGeneres.

And the Democrats think all this is normal and great and acceptable and you should go to jail if you don’t play along. Conservatives think you don’t play along with mental illness and get these people the help they need to be ok
with the body they were born with.

[johniegrad]

Just a slight correction to the article is in order. Rachel Levine has never served in the Navy in any capacity. He is an admiral in the Public Health Services. The uniforms just look the same.

[FLT-bird]

We need to massively cull the number of flag officers throughout the military. The senior ranks are absurdly bloated. This would increase efficiency and lower costs.

[Churchillspirit]

LOL! Good one, Red.

[SaveFerris]

[Take Rick ‘Rachel’ Levine, the transgender health secretary of Pennsylvania ... who was commissioned as a four-star admiral by the (Joe) Biden administration making him both the first transgender four-star admiral, and the first four-star female admiral or the first four-star female impersonator.]

DEMOCRAT Joe Biden is a Godless Reprobate who was continuing Satan's destructive work. Waging War on Reality, Biology and Almighty God.

THIS is the face of the Modern Democratic Party - committed to destroying Normal Society and not just in America, but ALL OVER THE WORLD.



LURKERS, PLEASE TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW -
SHARE THE IMAGES and TEXT via EMAIL / TEXT MESSAGES -
before it's too late!

DEMOCRAT JOE BIDEN WENT OUT OF HIS WAY TO INSULT THE
RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD & SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST ON

EASTER SUNDAY,
MARCH 31, 2024



Pastor Greg Laurie:

This is really hard to believe.

(DEMOCRAT) President Biden issued a proclamation recognizing March 31 (2024) as Transgender Day of Visibility.

This is also the date of Easter where we celebrate the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. What is the president thinking?

This is a profound insult to the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Americans on our holiest day.

America needs God more then ever and yet this is the stance the White House takes.

It’s time to turn back to God not turn our backs on God.

We need to repent and pray for a spiritual awakening in America. It is our only hope.

https://x.com/greglaurie/status/1774211754371018918

[SaveFerris]

Good update to the thread

[pas]

Number 1 injury in the military is saluters elbow.

[Leaning Right]

Yep. Levine was a Public Health Services “admiral”. Their uniforms should not look like the Navy’s. It’s silly to the point of being insulting (to the Navy).

Bull Halsey put in 30 years of service before making admiral. Levine made admiral in one day. Something just doesn’t seem right there.

[AndyJackson]

C. Northcote Parkinson described this whole thing well in Parkinson’s Law - when he described the decline and fall of the Royal Navy.

[AndyJackson]

Well if you aren’t worthy respect at least you can demand a salute.

[Vaduz]

Few actually command ships.

Uncle Joey said they don’t have to so there.

[TTFlyer]

Nimitz, Spruance, Halsey, Lee, Oldendorf vs. what we have now. Sad.

[pierrem15]

What would improve lower officer morale? Sacking 80% of the top brass and increasing their pay with the savings, including firing or reassigning all the paper pushers in the entourage of the top brass.

[Campion]

I don’t understand why HHS needs an imitation-military “public health service,” complete with make-believe “ranks” and silly uniforms. Is supposed to terrify the germs? I don’t think it works very well.

[paterfamilias]

Dan, get your facts straight.

Rachel Levine was an admiral in the US Public Health Service, not the US Navy. USPHS uses Navy uniforms (with different insignia to differentiate) and ranks, but their officers are not part of the Naval Service.

[MNnice]

Actually, the Navy only has 250 ships. An admiral generally commands a fleet, which consists of several (10-20) ships. So we probably need about 10-20 admirals. We have 300.

[texas booster]

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam and leftism.

Men die in the desert while earning less than they would working in an Amazon warehouse while the brass socialize in D.C. and try to figure out why they have a recruitment problem.

An excellent Sultan Knish look at our military. Worth your time, and copied in full.

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Daniel Greenfield's website: The Sultan Knish blog

[Retain Mike]

The two criticisms before are nonsense. I take the US Naval Institute Proceedings and in May issue they list all the Navy admirals and what they do. Most hold make-work jobs at the Pentagon and other offices. Admirals need to be in charge of ships and all others need to function without flag rank.

“To cut this amount from the senior ranks of the military, I think will impact military readiness

Critics of Hegseth’s planned cuts claim that we need growing administrative overhead to function