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Three years ago, Army Secretary John McHugh visited Joint Base Lewis-McChord to announce plans for a kind of unit that would be unique in the military: A division headquarters led by a two-star general that would never go to war.

To drive home the point, McHugh said he’d assign the division just 250 soldiers, making it about one-third the size of a full headquarters. That would be enough to oversee home-station training of the combat brigades JBLM gained during the Iraq War, but not enough for its own overseas missions.

McHugh’s original plan now has been thrown out the window.

via ‘The little division that could:’ How JBLM’s ‘non-deployable’ unit was called to deploy | Military News | The News Tribune.

When the Army switched from a divisional model to the BCT model, one thing they did was try to trim the size of headquarters. Honest. Really. In fact, for a while there, the Army increased the size of its divisions from 3 brigades to four BCTs as a means of increasing its combat units without increasing the numbers of headquarter units. They had to strip a maneuver battalion from each BCT to do it, but it was an honest attempt to field leaner units.

Unfortunately, that left Joint Base Lewis-McChord with something like 10 BCTs and only one division headquarters to supervise training. That was a bit much. So the 7thID headquarters was reconstituted to provide adult supervision to some of the BCTs on base (which, interestingly, didn’t patch over to 7thID, but held onto their existing alignments in terms of heraldry, but reported to 7thID for training and court martial authority).

But, as the article notes, division headquarters are being deployed a lot. Mind you, they aren’t necessarily out in the field as command elements for full up divisions. Rather, divisional headquarters are tailored to act as a command node integrating not just Army maneuver elements, but all ground elements, and, critically, act as the integrator for other services and nations, and other government agencies when deployed overseas. Not every deployment calls for a full theater command, with a four star general and subordinate three star component commanders. The divisional HQ is about the lowest level that can provide this command node, even though it might have only a single BCT directly reporting  to it.