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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.