Staff Officer 2

[Jeannine Lander]

A military staff or general staff (also referred to as army staff, navy staff, or air staff within the individual services) is a group of officers, enlisted and civilian staff who serve the commander of a division or other large military unit in their command and control role through planning, analysis, and information gathering, as well as by relaying, coordinating, and supervising the execution of their plans and orders, especially in case of multiple simultaneous and rapidly changing complex operations. They are organised into functional groups such as administration, logistics, operations, intelligence, training, etc. They provide multi-directional flow of information between a commanding officer, subordinate military units and other stakeholders.[1][2] A centralised general staff results in tighter top-down control but requires larger staff at headquarters (HQ) and reduces accuracy of orientation of field operations, whereas a decentralised general staff results in enhanced situational focus, personal initiative, speed of localised action, OODA loop, and improved accuracy of orientation.[2]

A commander "commands" through their personal authority, decision-making and leadership, and uses general staff to exercise the "control" on their behalf in a large unit. Most NATO nations, including the United States and most European nations, use the Continental Staff System which has origin in Napoleon's military. The Commonwealth Staff System, used by most of the Commonwealth, has its origin in the British military.[2]

One of the key purposes of a military staff is to provide accurate, timely information (which includes the results of contingency planning) on which command decisions are based. A goal is being able to suggest approaches or help produce well-informed decisions that will effectively manage and conserve unit resources.

In addition to generating information, the staff also manages the flow of communication within the unit and around it. While controlled information flow toward the commander is a priority, those useful or contingent in nature are communicated to lower-level units and/or through their respective staffs. If the information is not pertinent to the unit, it is redirected to the command level which can best utilize the condition or information.

Staffs are generally the first to know of issues that affect its group. Issues that require major decisions affecting the unit's operational capability are communicated to the commanding officer. However, not all issues will be handled by the commander. Smaller matters that arise are given to a more appropriate tasker within the unit to be handled and resolved, which would otherwise be an unnecessary distraction for the Commanding Officer who already makes numerous decisions every day.

In a generic command staff, more seasoned and senior officers oversee staff sections of groups organized by the needs of the unit. Senior Enlisted Personnel task personnel in the maintenance of tactical equipment and vehicles. Senior Analysts are tasked with the finalizing of reports, and their enlisted personnel participate in the acquisition of information from subordinate staffs and units. This hierarchy places decision making and reporting under the auspices of the most experienced personnel and maximizes information flow of pertinent information sent out of the command overall, clarifying matters overall. This frees up the most senior members of the command at each level for decision making and issuing direction for further research or information gathering (perhaps requiring men to put their lives at risk to gather additional intelligence).

Operations staff officers also are tasked with battle planning both for offensive and defensive conditions, and issuing contingency plans for handling situations anticipated during the foreseeable future.

Prior to the late 18th century, there was generally no organizational support for staff functions such as military intelligence, logistics, planning or personnel. Unit commanders handled such functions for their units, with informal help from subordinates who were usually not trained for or assigned to a specific task.

Count Leopold Joseph von Daun, in a letter to Empress Maria Theresa in January 1758, pressed for a more important role for the Generalquartiermeister (Chief of Staff).[3] The failures in the army, especially at the Battle of Leuthen made it clear that Austria had no "great brain" and the command needed to spread the workload to allow the Commander-in-chief the time to consider the strategic picture. The 1757 regulations had created the Grosse Feldgeneralstab and Kleine Generalstab (large and small general staff) and after changes in 1769, a permanent staff of 30 officers was established under the direction of Franz Moritz von Lacy, which would be expanded in wartime with junior officers.[4] The Grosse staff was divided into three: First, the Intrinsecum, which handled internal administration and directing operations; secondly, external activities, including the Pioneers; thirdly, the Inspection Service, which handled the issuing of orders and prisoners of war. Alongside the General Staff was the General Adjutant, who led a group of Adjutant staff selected by the army commanders to handle the details of internal administration and collating intelligence, and answered to the Commander-in-chief. The Chief of Staff became the chief adviser to the Commander-in-chief and, in a fundamental move away from the previous administrative role, the Chief of Staff now undertook operational planning, while delegating the routine work to his senior staff officers. Staff officers were drawn from line units and would later return to them, the intention being that they would prove themselves as leaders during their time with the staff. In a battle or when the army had detached corps, a small number of staff would be allocated to the column commander as a smaller version of headquarters. The senior man, usually a Major, would be the chief of the column staff and his principal task would be to help the commander to understand what was intended.

Before the Crimean War staff work was looked at "with great disdain" in the British Army; the hardships of that war caused by disorganization led to a change in attitude.[12] The General Staff in Britain was formed in 1905, and reorganized again in 1908. Unlike the Prussian staff system, the British Army was thought too small to support separate staff and command career streams. Officers would typically alternate between staff and command.[12] Beevor, Inside the British Army, says instead that the terrible cleavages between staff and line units caused by the enormous losses during the trench warfare of the World War I meant that senior British officers consequently decided that all officers would rotate between staff and line responsibilities, preventing the development of a separate general staff corps.

The "Continental Staff System", also known as the "General Staff System" (GSS), is used by most NATO countries in structuring their militaries' staff functions. In this system, which is based on one originally employed by the French Army in the 19th century, each staff position in a headquarters or unit is assigned a letter-prefix corresponding to the formation's element and one or more numbers specifying a role.

Since the original continental staff system only covered branches 1 through 6, it is not uncommon to see 7 through 9 omitted or having various meanings.[15] Common variation include merging of 3 and 5 to 3, Operations and Plans; omitting the training branch and utilizing 7 for engineering (as seen in US Military Sealift Command[16] and Multinational Forces-Iraq (MNF-I)[17]) and replacing 9 with a legal branch (making CIMIC a part of another branch, i.e. 2 or 4) as seen with the UK Permanent Joint Headquarters.[18]

Derived from the Prussian Groe Generalstab (Great General Staff), traditionally these staff functions were prefixed by the simple G, which is retained in place for modern army usage. But the increasing complexity of modern armies, not to speak of the spread of the staff concept to naval, air and other elements, has demanded the addition of new prefixes. These element prefixes are:

On some occasions the letter E can also be observed, though it is not an official term. In that case it is for element and it will be used to identify a small independent element, that is a part of a non-staff organization; i.e., an E3 is an operational element on a logistics site or an E4 is a logistics element on a forward medical support site.

Thus, the personnel officer of a naval headquarters would be referred to as N1. In reality, in large organizations each of these staff functions will require the support of its own large staff, so N1 refers both to the office and the officer in charge of it. The continental staff system can be carried down to the next level: J1.3 (or J13, sometimes the dot-separator is omitted) is thus the operations officer of the personnel office of a joint headquarters, but the exact definition of the roles at this level may vary. Below this, numbers can be attached following a hyphen, but these are usually only positional numbers assigned arbitrarily to identify individuals (G2.3-2 could be the budget officer in the operations section of the intelligence department; A1.1-1-1 might simply be a receptionist).

The manpower or personnel officer supervises personnel and administration systems. This department functions as the essential administrative liaison between the subordinate units and the headquarters, handling personnel actions coming from the bottom up (such as a request for an award to be given to a particular soldier) or from the top down (such as orders being received from the army level directing that a particular soldier be reassigned to a new unit outside the command). In army units, this person is often called the Adjutant. The S-1 also works with the postal mailing office, and deals with awards and ranks as well.

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