The thread has moved on a bit but I've been busy so I'm coming back to this.
I'll throw the challenge out to those arguing that the Divisions/Areas/Whatever in the CA are superflous. If your brigades are focused on managing the generation of combat power, and the CA is focused on corporate requirements, business planning, and force development, why would you eliminate a layer of HQ that handles the following (paraphrasing from a previous experienced poster):
Because intermediate HQ are unnecessary for the following reasons:
- Provides proper "span of control" to the CA's numerous Regular and Reserve formations;
The span of control might be appropriate if in fact the Army had 20 brigades or even the 14 brigades it pretends to have. It doesn't. It has the people for approximately eight brigades. That could conceivably warrant two divisions if, in fact, there was a plan for the Army to operationally deploy a division and each division had a role to prepare for. The Army does not have such a plan. In fact we do have a deployable div HQ within CJOC which would fill that role but that Div HQ is not an "Army" resource. There is no plan to equip or give an operational role to an additional divisional headquarters which leaves the question solely about whether an administrative intermediate HQ is required to facilitate the "administrative span of control" of what ought to be eight brigades.
If we look at other organizations, eight brigades is not too many for one entity to control administratively. As an example, under the Brit Army 2020 Refine, 3 UK Div held five brigades; 1 UK Div held eight brigades and Force Troops held nine or ten brigades/groups. That has been changed under Future Soldier where the Army may have shortened its span of control but increased that of the brigades' to the point where some control up to 12 battalions.
The question though when dealing with an organization's span of control is whether it is best served by a flatter or taller structure. When the US Army was faced with a mandated reduction of its headquarters size in 2014,
it settled on opting for a flatter structure with a median span of control of eight and found significant improvement in its effectiveness and its efficiency due in part to shorter reporting lines.
- Provides a regional structure for Dom Ops, and speaks with the provinces;
This is easily a function that can be held by the G9 cell of a given brigade (tied into other cells). A portion of that cell can be a stay behind element if the brigade headquarters is required to deploy.
- Manages infrastructure and interfaces with Real Property Management;
That too could be a stay behind function of a portion of the brigade's G4 cell although I personally favour that all Army infrastructure be managed a by a single cell at Army HQ because infrastructure and its associated core manning does not move when the brigade deploys. I have the same view as to current divisional training infrastructure which in my mind should all fall under CADTC.
- Manages the Reserves and much of its administration.
The districts, areas and brigades managed adequately before there were Land Force regional areas. More importantly, management issues would be reduced if the ARes brigades were reduced in number and their current RSS brigade and unit staffs properly organized with both command, administrative and training duties.
Personally I'd like to see all brigades be a mixture of RegF and ARes personnel in varying ratios with responsibility for managing all of the brigade's administration. Personnel management ought to happen through the brigade's G1 cell. Again, there should be a G1-x stay behind cell to continue personnel management for non deployed RegF and ARes pers. Generally we never deploy a whole brigade and have a need for there to be command and control of what stays behind anyway but the system should be designed for a worst case scenario where a brigade in total goes but has to be able to deal with LOBs.
If you think this is going to be centrally managed from Ottawa, or handled by a CMBG, then I'd counter that your argument fails to consider what each echelon of command does from day-to-day.
I'd argue that what each echelon does from day-to-day is a function of an established routine of what it has been doing for the last thirty years without ever actually doing a serious review of how to improve the system. It isn't that there aren't better ideas and ways of doing things but that the military is highly resistant to change.
B. H. Liddell Hart probably said it best: “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.”3 Many military leaders would agree that their organizations are highly resistant to change as a result of their size, complexity, and culture. Yet despite a general awareness of this challenge, even seasoned defense leaders underestimate the degree of inertia and resistance to change within their organization.
Five principles to manage change in the military
Andrew Leslie made note of that in his Report on Transformation back in 2011.
We'll probably never agree on this issue. I'm firmly of the view that the CF and the Army are bound up in a complex bureaucracy that is inherently inefficient. Most business entities who look at radical change find that flattening the organizational structure and reducing the numbers of intermediate reporting echelons increases efficiency. The divisional headquarters offers absolutely zero deployable combat capability which should make it superfluous
unless it adds significant administrative efficiency. Judging by the anecdotal evidence just in this forum, it doesn't; it adds complexity and inefficiency. Do the divisions remove some of the work from the Army HQ's G Cells - probably. But, general experience in industry shows that flattening the reporting structure reduces overall workload and personnel requirements while speeding and standardizing decision making.
Can the Army headquarters absorb the divisions' administrative functions? Of course it can. The military branch staff structure provide a soup to nuts coverage of all necessary functions required. These are already broadly divided into current operations (in the Army's case - force generation) and future planning (in the Army's case - force structure, doctrine etc).
So what's missing - back to Liddell Hart - the will to change or even contemplate it. IMHO headquarters structures are to the Canadian Army today what the horse was in the 1930s.
