United States General Staff

The General Staff is a large body of officers within an army who are charged with centralized planning and who have supervision over all field armies. The General Staff was originally used in Germany, while both the United States and the Confederate States used the position of General-in-Chief instead.

Following General-in-Chief William Rosecrans' disastrous experience of command during the Second Mexican War, German military attache Alfred von Schleiffen convinced the US Army that it would do better to adopt the centralized General Staff system. This was one of a number of innovations which Germany shared with the US in the effort to make the US a fit military ally within the Central Powers alliance system. The Confederates also adopted the General Staff system some time before the Great War, but theirs was not as comprehensive.

Under Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood, the General Staff corrdinated the US Army more effectively during the Great War than the General-in-Chief had during earlier wars, but was not without its own flaws. Field officers tended to perceive staff officers as stodgy, effete bureacrats who were out of touch with the rigors of the front, and many disdained the General Staff. Some, like George Armstrong Custer and Daniel MacArthur, even deliberately concealed activities which the Staff would have countermanded had it known of them.

One famous shortcoming of the Staff was its insistence during the Great War that barrels be spread across the line and not concentrated at certain points during attack. Custer's disobedience of this doctrine allowed him to plan the successful Barrel Roll Offensive, the offensive which allowed the US to win a major war for the first time in a lifetime. MacArthur, on the other hand, used his subversion of the Staff's orders uring the Second Great War to plan a landing on the Peninsula and a move against Richmond aping George McClellan's halfhearted advance during the War of Secession. Though MacArthur would surely have pressed the attack much harder than McClellan, the operation would most likely have been disastrous. Fortunately, it was betrayed to the Staff by Abner Dowling, who had once risked his career to conceal Barrel Roll plans from the same Staff.

During the budget cuts to which the military was subjected during the interwar years by the Socialist Party, the General Staff had to make budgetary decisions. It cut a number of innovative but unproven technological development programs, putting the US at a disadvantage early in the Second Great War.

John Abell was a career General Staff officer. Irving Morrell briefly served on the Staff during the Great War, planning operations in Utah. He found the duty stifling and longed for a return to active combat, leaving Philadelphia with a lower opinion of the General Staff than he'd had when he arrived.