Too Thin on Top: The Under-Resourcing of Headquarters in Force Design

Transformation is a difficult and painful process guided by multiple factors. Critical among these factors in designing new forces should be warfighting headquarters capabilities but too often personnel and budgetary considerations outweigh those critical warfighting capabilities in building unit and force designs. I intend to use this paper to show how historically the Army and OSD have regularly shortchanged their headquarters elements when designing unit structure and subsequently have paid a price in effectiveness and capabilities at the initiation of conflict and then had to scramble to augment those headquarters with unresourced assets in war. Consequently instead of going to war with capable trained teams that have working relationships and processes the U.S. military has had to fight wars through ad-hoc headquarters cobbled together with borrowed or newly acquired equipment and untrained augmentees and that now in the recent design of the UEx headquarters the Army is continuing to follow this model of inadequacy.