General staff, in the military, a group of officers that assists the commander of a division or larger unit by formulating and disseminating his policies, transmitting his orders, and overseeing their execution. Normally a general staff is organized along functional lines, with separate sections for administration, intelligence, operations, training, logistics, and other categories. In many countries a similar but more elaborately organized staff assists the supreme military authority. While a general staff contains specialists as well as more broadly trained officers, it is distinguished in character and functions from special staffs (in the U.S. Army) consisting of technical specialists in the various services: medical, police, communications, supply, and others.
Although the name general staff was sometimes applied to high military staffs in the 18th century, the institution did not appear in its modern form until the early 19th century, in the Prussian army, and in other European countries after 1870. The U.S. Army created a general staff in 1903, the British army in 1906. In the British and U.S. armies, however, the general staff differed from that of the Prussian army in that the officers, although especially qualified, were not trained as an elite corps; they were individually selected from the officer corps as a whole just as for other assignments. The air force counterpart of army general staff is usually called the air staff.
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Helmuth von Moltke: Early career…was attached to the Prussian General Staff in March 1832 and promoted to the rank of first lieutenant a year later. Toward the end of 1835 he was sent to Turkey to advise Sultan Mahmud II on the modernization of the Turkish Army, and in 1836 he was authorized by…
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Erich Ludendorff: Early life…generally known as the “great general staff,” which was responsible for preparing contingency deployment and mobilization plans. Under the chief of the general staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, Ludendorff played a significant part in the revision of the Schlieffen Plan. This plan envisaged a gigantic outflanking movement involving the infringement…
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the United States Army
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Helmuth von MoltkeHelmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian and German General Staff (1858–88) and the architect of the victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1871). Moltke’s father, a man of unstable character, belonged to the nobility of Mecklenburg, his mother to an old family of the free city…
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2 references found in Britannica articlesAssorted References
- Ludendorff
- Moltke